Forty-Five Years In, and Still Not Finished

A Facebook post, a missed book deal, and forty-five years of things worth saying.

My wife thinks my Facebook posts are too long. She’s right — for Facebook. But every time I post one, the responses keep coming for days.

These are posts about places: a particular stretch of road in the Peloponnese where history turned on a single morning, or the quarter of Athens where refugees from Smyrna settled after 1922 and changed Greek music forever. History, culture, the meaning that accumulates in places over centuries. The kind of thing that takes a while to explain properly.

That instinct — to not stop before the idea is actually clear — has been with me since the beginning.

In the late 1970s, I was so shy that having to address five people in a room would cause me to break out in a cold sweat. I’d start a sentence and lose the thread before I’d finished it. Clearly, this was not going to work. So I did something deliberate: I volunteered to teach the introductory sessions of the commercial programming course I had just completed. Evening classes, four weeks. I knew the material cold, which meant I could use the energy I would otherwise have spent on panic to work on exactly one thing: learning how to talk to a room.

It worked. Within a few years I was presenting at major conferences. When Microsoft launched VB5, they sent me around Australia to present to audiences of thousands. When Borland released Delphi, I did the same across Australia and New Zealand. I wrote a monthly column for a technical publication. A major publisher approached me about writing a book — and I didn’t pursue it, for reasons that made sense at the time. I’ve spent the years since regretting it.

Last month, I finally wrote the book. *Code Is Design* is about why software projects fail — which turns out to be about a fundamental misunderstanding of what software development actually is. Writing it confirmed something I already knew: I still have things to say, and I’m still not finished saying them.

So. Ground Truth.

The name means what it says. We are living through a period in which facts are being systematically contested, weaponised, and replaced with narratives designed to divide. I am watching the contempt for expertise — the manufactured grievance, the tribal loyalty test, the aggressive denial of observable reality — emerge in Australian public life in ways that would have seemed extraordinary ten years ago. I have children who are working harder than my wife and I ever had to, for less security. I have grandchildren who will inherit whatever world we leave for them.

I am not a political commentator and I have no interest in becoming one. But I’ve spent forty-five years in an industry that runs on whether you’re willing to tell people what you actually think rather than what they want to hear — and I’ve come to believe that clear, honest explanation from someone who has actually done something is in shorter supply than it should be.

Ground Truth will cover technology and organisations, because that’s where I’ve spent most of my working life. It will cover health, because thirty years of managing Type 2 diabetes has given me a perspective I didn’t ask for and won’t waste. It will cover Greek-Australian life, history, and identity, because that’s where I come from and it is underwritten in the broader culture in ways that deserve more attention than they get. And it will cover whatever else demands attention.

One post a week. Honest, I hope. Occasionally long.

My wife has been warned.