1. Do you show up for others when it matters?

2. Give other people the chance to show up for you.

3. I’m grateful for people showing up for me and a short reading from my book, The Tech Drama.

This past weekend I went to a funeral for a friend’s grandmother. As I walked through the church doors my friend saw me and her eyes widened, “Thank you so much for coming,” she said. As I stood in the church pews, I reflected on the momentary recognition of gratitude and what it means to show up.

Last month I did something I have never done. I threw a party for myself.

I am one of the last people who would ever self-promote.

Why would anyone want to celebrate me or my accomplishment?

Over the last ten years, since the inspiring incident for my book, The Tech Drama, I’ve come to the conclusion my resistance to celebrating my accomplishment is much more about me than other people. The Tech Drama is also about deep change.

The book’s narrator, who shares my name, would have also struggled to celebrate himself. However, I have realized I am the sort of person who shows up for people. Throwing a party for my accomplishment gave people a chance to show up for me. --And they did.

Before I had even announced a date for the party I worried that I was going to invite 100 people and no one would show up. In the end, a few people who RSVP’d forgot. However, this was balanced out by the people who didn’t RSVP and showed up as well as the people who RSVP’d and brought a +1.

I worried about the invitations, venue, and the refreshments, but I made a list and worked it. It worked out.

The party lasted about 90 minutes. An hour in, I turned on the public address system I had rented and quietly spoke up.

“Thank you all for coming.” I looked out at the crowd.

My kids. My girlfriend. My parents.
     A college professor.
          My former teammates, now friends.
               My former colleagues, now friends.
                    Friends from school.
                         Friends from who knows where? And who cares?
                    An ex brother in law.

I spoke from the heart, though I had an idea of what I would say.

“As I prepared for this moment, thinking about the reading I planned to do, I was afraid. Now that the moment is here, looking out at each of you, I don’t feel the fear at all. I see people who I care for and who care for me. There’s not one of you who I would have to hold anything back for, which means so much.”

“The subtitle of my book is, ‘Focus, Work the Problem. You are not crazy. Maybe.’ The idea of craziness, feeling insane--I think it’s not so far from the truth these days, whether it’s politics, social media, or in the case of my book, work. I want to start off by reading a passage from a book I was supposed to read in high school. I say supposed to because I think back then I just read what I thought I had to, to pass the test. Two years ago, I was walking, listening to Beloved, by Toni Morrison, and I came across this passage, which just struck me as truth. I think it gets to the heart of how we unwind that feeling of craziness.”

As I spoke, I picked up a paperback of Beloved. I opened to a page marked by a yellow adhesive tab.

I began setting the stage, “One of the main characters is being tormented by a ghost and it the whole situation is becoming the subject of local gossip. While the town is talking, the main character is suffering intensely.” I scanned to the last paragraph of the page and began to read.

It took them days to get the story properly blown up and themselves agitated and then to calm down and assess the situation. They fell into three groups: those that believed the worst; those that believed none of it; and those, like Ella, who thought it through.^[1]

I closed the book and looked up. I spoke from the heart again, “The context is different, but there’s no getting around the incredibility of the situation. The truth of the people who believe the worst and the people who believe nothing speaks directly to the polarization we see everywhere. When I think about everything that I am, I write for the last group, the Ella’s of the world; the ones who think it through and then act in the service of others.”

I picked up the bigger, black paperback, my book. I opened to a pink, adhesive tab.

I spoke, “Now, I’ll read from my book, The Tech Drama. In this scene, the narrator’s company has just been through a bankruptcy, a long-time colleague has just been fired, and things are feeling shaky. In the process, the narrator has just gotten word he has a new boss.” I began to read..

Andy accepted the role.

I had been advocating a leadership meeting between heads of the groups within radiology since I had found out we were going to be reorganized. Before the restructuring, each of us, product management, engineering, support, implementations, and sales were equals. No one had power over another. I thought we needed to better understand one another’s concerns.

Andy setup a leadership call two days later.

A good sign.

Andy began, “I’m really sorry we can’t all be there in Pittstown, but I’ve known all of you for forever. It’s really all about relationships, Jeremy.”

Did he just say my name?

Andy continued, “Phil, how long have we known each other?”

“It’s been a long time, Andy,” Phil replied.

“You see, Jeremy, it’s about relationships.”

Did I just hear… what?

“PJ, great to talk to you again. Our relationship is really strong, Jeremy.“

“Thanks, Andy, it’s good to be working together again,” PJ responded.

“—Yes, it is. Oh, sorry for talking over you.”

Andy hadn’t talked over him. I thought, ‘This is getting weird.’

“Barbara, we’ve been working together a long time. This really would be much more difficult for me if we didn’t have that relationship established. Sorry, we aren’t all there in Pittstown, Jeremy.”

Barbara shared a quick, “Thanks, Andy.”

Andy continued, “Mick, thanks for doing so much in the last few days. We’ve known each other forever, and sales has been in such great hands, Jeremy.”

Mick responded, “Thanks, Andy. I feel really good, like we’re turning a corner.”

“That’s great, Mick. I sure hope—sorry for talking over you.” Andy paused. “I sure hope so.”

I told myself,

Head down. Do your best. There’s something going on here, and you’re going to have to work through it.

“I want to have a regular leadership meeting with all of you. You see, Jeremy, I really want to have a good relationship with each of you.”

I was surprised the first time he spoke my name. By the fifth, speechless.

I spun,

What’s this about relationship?

What’s with all the Jeremy’s?

Did I talk over Catherine?

Maybe.

What’s with all the Jeremy’s?

Did I talk over Catherine?

Oh, god, I think I did.

What’s this about relationships?

Catherine said Andy was an idiot,
many times, but Andy says they are bonded.

It was the weirdest meeting I had ever been in, up to that point.

After the meeting, I went to get coffee at the shop down the street. It was a nice way to unwind and get away.

I walked by Pete, the IT guy, in the hallway on the way back to my desk. IT Pete had been talking with Ilya and Karyn when Karyn had pulled me aside that first week.

In a curt tone of disinterest he asked me, “Are you happy, Jeremy?” There was no pause for a response. I turned to him, but he was gone...

I closed the book, and looked up. I continued right away, fearful of applause or ... lack of applause. “Andy was right. It is about relationships. Yet I think Andy is only half right. Over the next 100 pages, Andy, IT Pete, and others go on to gaslight the narrator. These people relate to each other, in service of their perception of an unjustly fired coworker. --But their loyalty is misplaced. Instead of seeking truth, they accept a narrative and use it to justify exerting fear and control over the narrator. I think this is one model of relationship: relationships that are about control. In such a relationship, a dominant person is the source of truth. Loyalty is the blind acceptance of the truth provided by the dominator. That’s not what I see when I look around at all of you.”

I paused for a moment, eyes scanning the audience. Then I continued, “I remember having a conversation with a man who is here tonight. We came to the joint insight that the only true loyalty is loyalty to the truth. This is not the truth of the dominant person, this is the truth of the honest account of your own perspective as well as listening to and incorporating the honest perspectives of those around you. It’s seeking out the unheard perspective. It’s reserving judgment. I think this is a particularly important thing to keep in mind today. It’s for those who think it through.”
I paused for a moment.

“Before I conclude, I want to lean into the word truth. I love the ‘T’ ‘R’ ‘U’ words. Truth. True. And trust. Trust is what I feel here, with all of you. Again, it’s so easy to speak to all of you, because I trust you. In another time I might not have.”

“I had a conversation a few days ago with someone who had read the book. He commented on the unreliable narrator. The narrator doesn’t believe in himself, he questions his own reliability. This is by design, but I think by the end of the book we find the narrator was actually the most reliable source. The narrator needed to go through the journey to trust himself.”

“The book is an autofiction, which is short for autobiographical fiction. As I close I recognize there are characters in the narrator’s journey that believe in and support him. They couldn’t do the work for him, but they were necessary. In this moment, a book launch in a coffee shop, I come to the gratitude I feel for all of you. I couldn’t have written this book without the demonstration of your trust and your support. I love you all. Thank you.”

Then came the gentle applause I feared would come and feared would not come.

There had never been anything to fear.

1. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Knopf, 1987.↩︎

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• Similarities between authoring a book and software development

• Improving my process as an author/editor

• Some embarrassing typos

After 4 years of work, 2 editors, 1 beta reader, countless personal reads, and a pair of “final” reads, I thought I had my book perfected. I knew there were a few issues. I am the type of person who can look at a page and has misspelled words pop out at me. I used to sit with graphic designers and have to keep from pointing out when images were offset by 1 pixel, to stay focused on the greater task.

A few themes from my life as a software engineer, engineering manager, and product manager:

You will never find every bug (typo).

I really thought my spelling was good enough to not run the spell checker. Then, I ran it before my final proof and found ~40 misspellings through ~195,000 words. That’s a misspelled word every 15 pages. I was really happy I had done it. From a grammar perspective, I assumed the grammar checker would beat up on my colloquial style. I’m informal. So, I didn’t run it.

A few days after release a close friend asked me, “I think I’ve found something. Maybe it’s the way Kindle formats things, but you might want to check it out.”

I thought for sure it was how Scrivener formats for Kindle. The issue was:

When I checked the manuscript, the duplicate words were definitely in there. It wasn’t Kindle. It was me.1 Again, I had just read that text. It had been there for months. My brain just went past it. It had slipped past the editors doing developmental reads and my beta reader who had editing experience.

I ended up running Scrivener’s grammar checker, which I should have done in the first place. One of my lessons of dealing with the events that inspired The Tech Drama is to not beat myself up over these things. However, I recognize that an old me would be sick with things like:

This one is particularly embarrassing.

So, I’m putting out The Tech Drama 1.0.2, with about 20 corrections, including 10+ duplicated words.

Let’s touch on another lesson.

When you fix something, don’t break something else

Seems obvious. However, we’re in the “Move fast and break things,” era. “Bias towards action.” Both ethos skip the idea that you need to fix things and not make things worse. The point of agile, PDCA, OODA is to get to small victories, rapidly, knowing you may fail. The thing about it, the cost of putting defects (typos) in front of a user are still costs. If your brand becomes known for being shitty, people will look for alternatives. I happen to want my book to be good.

During authoring, there were times when I went to delete text in a “find” window and it looked like my word processor wasn’t responding. When I paused I would find that I had deleted text from my manuscript. I’m sure I did this more than once without noticing, and caught the issues in editing.

With v 1.0.2, I don’t have time to reread the entire manuscript. Even if I did, I would surely miss things. With software development, this is where we used automated tests. I considered my options. 2

In the end, I found that I could use Adobe Acrobat’s compare documents feature to compare my last document with my current one.3 This works to verify I didn’t make any inadvertent changes.

I’m not sure what else could go wrong, but I’ve done what I think is “due diligence,” to…

…Make it better, keep improving

I think 1.0.2 is a better version of The Tech Drama.4

I’ll push the changes today. Amazon asks for 72 hours to update, but often it has taken a few hours.

If you bought v.1.0.0, you should be able to update your Kindle version. If you have a print copy and want a cleaner version, get in touch. I haven’t found anything that affects the meaning of the book.

nothing...

…instead of going to my Amazon site, the browser timed out.

Part of the The Tech Drama is about my coming to terms with the importance of quality in things that we build. So, I’m particularly sensitive to things not working and how we support people. To a developer this can seem like, “it’s just a link, don’t throw a fit...” but to me... this is my book’s purchase link. 3+ years of writing, boiled down to following the link to buy the book. If it doesn’t work, that’s literally my livelihood. I could take the site out of the loop, but that doesn’t guarantee anything. A few months ago Amazon, who I can’t effectively cut out because they print the books, yes Amazon, lost a day’s worth of orders3. The other option for selling books because they over-relied on their AI coding tool! Did you read that article? It was buried, but it’s the canary in the coal mine. The problem, Dario and Sam Altman and Elon are all busy trying to hype things so they can IPO. Ingram, Amazon’s main competitor to printing books on demand, took 22 days to respond to a problem… Trusting Self-Publishing Platforms

The link came back after 5 minutes, but I really oppose the “move fast and break things,” mentality. Failure is a thing, but so is constant improvement. You have to fix the things you break. My old boss used to say, “Small victories, rapidly.” The point there, victories. You can have little failures, but you must come back and fix them, turning them into wins.

I read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. One of the big takeaways was: Steve Jobs learned a real lesson when he was fired by Apple: if you make things that suck, your business will begin to fail. Steve came back and turned Apple into a company that was all about quality. Quality: See W Edwards Deming.

My book is also about recovering from deep, emotional trauma through writing. It’s about managing a creative mind, because creative minds can catastrophize. In the 8 years since the book, I’ve gotten good at recognizing and working through this.

Status: Links are back online. Support responded within 10 minutes.

Next steps:

• I’m going to go ahead with my links.

• I’m going to check them regularly.

• If they begin to fail, I will find a new platform for the links. (That was the whole point in the first place.)

A go live wouldn’t be a go live without some drama.

Hey, I shipped! I fucking shipped! 3+ years of committed writing and a decade figuring it out.

Learn About/Buy The Tech Drama, available now! (If the links don’t work here’s the direct link):

The Tech Drama (Home)

Thanks for reading Persistent, Urgent Questions! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

• I’m relying on self-publishing software, but I ran into issues with the two biggest platforms. One could be worked through, the other is outstanding after 3 weeks.

• Quality vs New Features has always been a huge theme in software. No difference here.

I finally have a solid page count for The Tech Drama: 566.1 The page count allows me to generate a final cover and get copies of my book to proofread. The manuscript has been through 2 professional editings and 2 proofreads since December after 3 solid years of work. Now it’s time for what I hope are the final changes.

I’ve done a number of simple, financial models based around the two big print on demand services, IngramSpark2 and AmazonKDP3. I decided to setup in both services to compare how they actually work last fall. Now, it’s time to get my book setup on both platforms as I plan for a July 1 release.

Ingram/IngramSpark

I was super bullish on IngramSpark since Ingram only charges printing and shipping costs. They appeared to be the better deal. If I had to sell a book for $32.99 on Amazon, I could sell a book for $19.99+$5 shipping on Ingram. I was excited to save readers $8 a copy.

Unfortunately, when I went to do final setup for the book I ended up with an error:

No problem, right? I filed a support ticket to figure out what the “! On Hold” was. After a day I was patient. After 3 days I was concerned. I pinged the company after 2 weeks. After 3 weeks, still no answer. I have lost confidence.

Reddit suggested that IngramSpark used to value customer service, but service has gone downhill in the past year.

In the experiences I explore in The Tech Drama, quality and operational support are background themes. They suffered in the case of early-Polymodal because the organization put primary emphasis on “bookings.” The product teams, in turn listened more to the sales teams than the operations teams. If a customer being sold had a chance to ask for a feature that would make or break the sale, that feature was prioritized over making sure existing features worked. Over time this eroded the ability to build and deliver products and services. On the other hand, the private equity firm that owned Polymodal’s stock killed it when they sold their shares—and they sold all responsibility for the demo features the customers were expecting to be mature.

I don’t know if this is going on with IngramSpark. I do know there’s a giant operational hole consistent with setting something up and moving on. I read there used to be a support phone #, but that’s not on the website any more. I’ve heard many industry stories about laying off a department and then adding the work that was being done to another department. This depletes the resources that run the business. The c-suite calls it productivity because they appear to be making more money with less people, but meanwhile the quality of the service suffers. Less work is being done.

I could work around the problem and setup my book under another record in IngramSpark, but I have no confidence that they will take care of anything that goes wrong. Thinking it’s a dealbreaker. I might be better off printing 500 copies and selling on Shopify. TBD. For now, it’s been 20 days without a response.

UPDATE: IngramSpark Support responded on June 10, 22 days after the ticket was filed. They apologized for the delay; ‘heavier than normal support requests.’ That’s not the excuse they think it is—it’s a red flag. The support person ignored the problem as described and gave me the boilerplate answer, which of course, I had already explored. It’s ashame. IngramSpark could be a really good service.

Amazon KDP

The 400lb gorilla: Amazon KDP setup was simple and seemed to work last fall as well. There was on hiccup when I went to upload my most recent cover: a spinning wheel of death (SWOD).

I found relevant support online, which suggested switching machines and browsers. It didn’t instill confidence, but it was better than the dead end at IngramSpark. 3 browsers later, I was able to get the upload to work.

Redoing work, particularly when setting up accounts and assets that are supposed to handle real business and real money is serious. One really serious thing with Amazon and the current Generative AI zeitgeist: In May I came across a story from March 2026 which claimed Amazon was losing orders, a lot of orders, because they were putting bad code into production. They were running too fast. See Business Insider, 2026-03-10. The story itself is difficult to check as the story was not widely covered, but it’s consistent with the narrative that we are in a giant hype cycle and bubble in big-tech. It’s consistent with what I have seen in generative AI: sometimes magic, sometimes garbage. It’s consistent with “enshittification.”

I really hope the SWOD wasn’t caused by their AI coding tool, but I can’t know.

Right now it looks like it’s setup in KDP.

The Tech Drama

The Tech Drama is an autofiction about about the human cost of the wrong values set in what should be doing meaningful work in tech. It’s about the tech hype cycle, building and selling great demos, and then realizing we got it wrong. Well, I realized we got it wrong. These days, I like to think I value quality.

Private readers are expressly permitted to read, keep, quote limited portions of, and otherwise use this book for personal purposes and as allowed under United States copyright law, including fair use. The rights of private readers are not subject to change.

Commercial, institutional, or AI-training use is covered by United States Copyright Law. This license is subject to change at any time, without notice (private reader rights will never change). If any part of this agreement is deemed unenforceable, any enforceable parts are still in effect. All disagreements will be settled in Pennsylvania, unless otherwise mutually agreed. Making use of any portion of this work constitutes agreement to this license and acceptance of any changes.

End of license.

Discussion and Notes:

Inquiries can be made to: info@ksbpub.com.

I listened to the song before bed every night for for two years1. In The Metanoia, it went beyond simply feeling the song was about me. For, if Catherine’s little plan could spider out from her and Dr. Patel to someone like Dean and Jack Van Damme, it could be anywhere. A decade later, the certainty has faded and I simply relate to the song.

I like the idea that, “The joke’s on them,” but the metaphor of a joke is like the metaphor of chess. This is life, not a game or a joke.

I thought the title of the album was a message from The Metanoia, “By The Way, I forgive you.” By the time the song came out, I was less guilt-ridden than angry. The anger doesn’t come out in The Tech Drama. The anger would come out later, alone, maybe in therapy. I’m convinced the anger wasn’t something I could allow myself to feel until I had built some

Catherine, Daniel, Dr. Patel, by the way, I … I’m not ready to say it yet.

It is maybe the perfect song about professional regret, about being promoted over a friend, maybe about losing a friend to the stresses and conflicts of work.

I would quote some of the lyrics here, but I’d have to quote every goddamn one.

That spring I still wondered if I was really a robot.

• I always thought there was a virtue to always being cool.

• I always thought time would prove Catherine wrong.

• There are times when it felt like I was being tested.

• There are times when it felt like I had failed the test and I wish I had it to do over again.

Or maybe it could be about Platonic love, losing Daniel?

It made a lot of sense at the time.

”Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”

--Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review

“The Prime Directive,” Agile Retrospective Resource Wiki (retrospectivewiki.org)

I think it set the tone and fit with the way I wanted to run a team. I took away:

• We worked in good faith.

• We trusted each other and we valued trust.

• We understood context has many facets, and people always did their best.

• Blame was not welcome. When there was a problem, we worked toward the solution.

The problem is, good faith and trust can only be localized for so long before the toxicity gets in. The Prime Directive did not fit with the “he/she threw me under the bus” mentality at work in some essential parts of Polymodal. Eventually, I learned what it meant to be in a bubble.

It was a surreal moment, as if there was a soundtrack and it was foreshadowing something.

There are a few stories surrounding this song, but when I separate the inspiration from the art: the lyrics are about confronting a villain and revealing their deceptions and heinous acts.

I thought pretending to not know was the professional thing to do. I didn’t know if she would see it that way.

There’s a simple, but amazing drum sequence.

I related to the song on first listen. Brandon Flowers’ enunciation makes the lyrics are clear and unmistakable. In my Metanoia, I was certain the song had just been released and it was written about me. As a matter of fact, it had been released in 2012, before the events of The Tech Drama, which begins in 2015. Part of my mind, the crazy part, searched for the technical ways they would have made the song and the album look like it was older than it was to throw me off, to pretend that it wasn’t about me. But I was certain it was about me and my experiences.

The non-crazy part of my mind simply…

related.

I had also known someone who had told a story by omitting half the detail and it had shaken me. And I had seen the truth in the story. And I hadn’t seen any way to fill in the omissions. Without the full story though, it was a lie. The song has an uplifting ending: anger, but also acceptance and personal growth.

It’s what I needed at the time.

It took me another decade to finally complete The Tech Drama, to tell essential parts of the story. I hope you:

relate.

Guilt and a desire to change.

Buy on Amazon/Kindle

No generative AI because: if it wasn’t worth my time to write it, why would it be worth your time to read it?

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The Tech Drama is a substack, but it’s also a book. The story of The Tech Drama is a decade old, but ‘1984’ is 80 years old. ‘Brazil’ is 40 years old. The tech advances. It always advances. It’s human behavior, our choices, who we show up as that truly influence the world.