Terms of use
The short version, which is also the whole version
This is a personal site. It publishes writing, keeps a public set of research notes, and runs two small tools. It sells nothing, has no accounts, and takes no payments, so this page is shorter than you are used to.
Last updated 14 August 2026.
The writing
Everything here is written by me and I hold the copyright. Quote it, cite it, argue with it, teach from it, and link to it freely. Attribution and a link back is all I ask. What I would rather you did not do is republish a whole piece somewhere else as though it were yours, or strip the sourcing out of a research piece and present the conclusions as bare facts. The sourcing is the point of those pieces.
Training on this content
Search indexing is welcome. Using this content to train or fine-tune a model is not permitted, and that restriction is declared in machine-readable form in the site's robots.txt as an express reservation of rights. Retrieval for answering a live question, with a link back, is fine.
Other people's material
The research notes quote and link to sources that belong to other people, under fair use for commentary and criticism. Those quotations remain theirs. If you own something quoted here and want it changed or removed, email me and I will deal with it rather than argue about it.
The tools
The second brain answers questions from my own notes, and Fit Signal scores an opportunity against my own rubric. Both are opinionated by design, both can be confidently wrong, and neither is a professional service. Do not paste anything confidential into either one.
The advice
The writing here describes what I have seen work and fail in enterprise systems. It is not professional, legal, or financial advice, and it is not a consulting engagement. Your systems, your constraints, and your organisation are not the ones I was writing about. Decide accordingly.
Where a piece makes a research claim, it says what the evidence supports and where I am extrapolating past it. Please keep that distinction if you carry a claim somewhere else.
Availability
The site is provided as it is. I make no promise that it will be up, that the tools will work, or that a page you liked will still be here. It is a personal site, not a service with an uptime commitment.
Getting in touch
Corrections, complaints, and takedown requests all go to the same place: shawntlenker@gmail.com. If I got a fact wrong I would genuinely rather know.
See also the privacy page, which describes what this site stores and what it does not.