Phil Windley’s Technometria

One Billion Thousand-Dollar Markets

Summary: Founders are told to look for a trillion-dollar market.

Nov 2 • Phil Windley

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October 2026

Identity Enables Autonomy

Summary: Moving a pico from one engine to another looks like a migration feature, but the point is autonomy.

Oct 30 • Phil Windley

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Pico Engine 1.8 Is for Builders

Summary: Smalltalk taught a generation of programmers what it felt like to build by conversing with a live system, and Alan Kay hoped it would turn…

Oct 27 • Phil Windley

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Closures, Objects, Actors, and Picos

Summary: I’ve been intrigued by closures since I taught introductory computer science from SICP at UC Davis in 1988.

Oct 21 • Phil Windley

Moving Picos from Mesh to Mesh

Summary: Software that can’t leave the machine it was born on isn’t really yours.

Oct 13 • Phil Windley

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September 2026

Human in the Loop Control for OpenClaw

Summary: Some agent actions are too consequential to leave to policy alone.

Sep 24 • Phil Windley

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Moving My Sensor Network onto Manifold

Summary: I moved my working LoRaWAN sensor network onto the new Manifold framework and pointed Home Assistant at it as the interface.

Sep 17 • Phil Windley

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Software-Defined Three-Way Switch

Summary

Sep 15 • Phil Windley

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There's a Personal App for That

Summary: My twenty-five-year-old Intel Play QX3 microscope had no software that would run on a modern Mac, so I used Claude to write one in a morning.

Sep 10 • Phil Windley

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Authentication Is Largely Solved. Authorization Isn't.

Summary: My new book, Authorization in Action, is out from Manning.

Sep 8 • Phil Windley

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Why Not SPIFFE for Pico Identity?

Summary: A pico is arguably just a workload, so why give it a DID instead of using SPIFFE, the standard workload identifier?

Sep 3 • Phil Windley

August 2026

Pico-to-Pico Identity Arrives

Summary: Version 1.6 of the Pico Engine ships the pico-to-pico identity layer I promised but hadn't built.

Aug 12 • Phil Windley

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