A while ago, I wrote an essay called ‘building software that “helps”’. In it, I attempted to formulate and distill a more operational format of the stuff I write about all of the time: software, technology, what it does to us and how to make that ‘doing’ more gentle and beneficial. As I was writing it, I came up with more and more caveats and other information I wished to pull in, but didn’t. There’s a number of core lessons that I’ve come to and written about, but I’ve never formatted it in a way that consolidates those learnings. In starting — I learned about how much was left to be done.

If we are leveraging AMBER alerts as a way to convince ourselves that in the off-chance a child will be harmed by a stranger, all we have to do is send messages and activate the citizens around us, we are greatly mistaken.

Software that helps people is hard. Perhaps, it is one of the hardest and most gratifying engineering and product development challenges we have to face in our modern world. It is the rarity of achieving that goal that makes it all the more imperative to do so. What a failure it would be to have all of these resource and opportunities, and to not seize the moment to give back to our world that gave us these resources.

ASDE-X is a runway surveillance program designed to prevent collisions and the FAA spent $550 million to install it at 35 of the busiest airports in the U.S. But on March 22, 2026, ASDE-X partially failed to predict a collision that would have prevented a fire truck from crossing the path of an incoming Air Canada CRJ, killing both pilots. Why did ASDE-X fail? Or, did it fail at all?

Stopping someone from posting about their suicidal thoughts doesn’t make them go away. Hiding comments in a celebrity’s post about their body does not stop people from dissecting it in other platforms. But, content moderation also gives these platforms a chance to deploy their answer to a question everyone is asking. What is a content generation platform’s responsibility to the greater world it exists in?