Episode
At 5AM I Passed Out at Work… Then Everything Changed
- Published
- Mar 21, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 875
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Summary
These days, in my unexpected post–Big Tech era, I spend a fair amount of time cooking for my family. There are worse fates. On this particular day, I was making stir-fried pork and turnips, which felt appropriate somehow: humble ingredients, a little heat, a little patience, and the faint possibility that if you look away for too long, everything burns. Which, now that I think about it, is also a decent summary of a lot of software projects. And as I cooked, I found myself remembering one of my favorite old tech war stories, the kind that only becomes funny once enough years have passed and everyone involved has either recovered emotionally or changed LinkedIn jobs three times. This one takes place in early 2010. The tech industry was still dragging itself out of the wreckage of the Great Financial Crisis, with all the grace of a hungover college student swearing off alcohol forever. I had just crawled out of one disastrous project at a digital consulting agency when, as a reward for surviving it, I was promptly assigned to another. The client was a major luxury car manufacturer. Let’s call them Clio . Clio wanted a beautiful new brand website powered by an enterprise CMS. The sales pitch was irresistible: non-technical staff would be able to create and publish content without relying on developers. Elegant. Efficient. Empowering. In theory. In practice, nobody on Clio’s internal IT team knew how to build a CMS-driven website at that scale. That gap, naturally, became our opportunity. Our agency sold them not just a delivery team, but also the comforting illusion that we would build it all together, shoulder to shoulder, on a schedule so aggressive it bordered on performance art. And this was no ordinary website. This was luxury automotive theater. Thousands of pages d…