About Still Broken, Still Building
“Everybody’s trying to figure out how to work the form, but no one’s trying to learn the craft.” — Orlando Jones
Why this title
Everything worth building—systems, organizations, ideas—arrives incomplete and stays that way. We inherit broken things. We create new fractures while trying to fix old ones. And yet we keep building, because the alternative is standing still.
Still Broken, Still Building names that permanent condition: not a problem to solve once, but a reality to work with over time.
What this place is
This publication is a record of looking.
Some days, that looking begins with software, data, or architecture. On other days, it begins with an older text, a line of philosophy, or a question that refuses to stay within one domain. Over time, these observations begin to speak to each other. Patterns surface. Connections form.
Think of this as a long-running notebook—a commonplace book—where ideas are collected, revisited, and occasionally woven into something more complete.
The lens
I write from the vantage point of a technical leader, but not to offer instruction or prescriptions. The interest here is orientation: how complex things take shape, how structure influences behavior, and how decisions echo forward.
Older frameworks, including Sun Tzu’s five factors and the idea of the commander as steward rather than hero, appear here not as doctrine, but as ways of seeing—tools for noticing alignment and misalignment across people, process, and technology.
What you’ll find
Reflections that move between technology and more human questions
Notes drawn from books, history, and practice
Essays that trace patterns across systems, organizations, and decisions
Observations gathered over time, not optimized for speed or novelty
Some pieces will be brief. Some will be long. All are part of the same ongoing walk.
An open-ended journey
This is not a manual or a playbook. It is a body of notes in motion.
If you are here, you are joining a long conversation with work, with ideas, and with the slow craft of understanding how things are built—and what they do to us in return.
Who am I
Daniel Horton is a CTO / Field CTO working with complex enterprise systems across data, architecture, and strategy. His writing is an open-ended exploration of the craft beneath technology and the long arc of building things that last.
