State your name and what you do.

Brandon Cowen. I write software. Some of it is a scheduler people use for free.

Black, out of a steel thermos I have had since 2011. It is dented. There is no order — I make it.

Best thing you have ever put in that thermos.

Soup. Once, in 2019. It was a very good soup and a permanent mistake, because you cannot get soup out of a thermos. It is in there. It is part of the thermos now.

Worst tool you have ever owned.

A twenty-eight-function multi-tool somebody gave me in 2012. Twenty-eight functions, and the pliers were about the width of a coin. That is the whole lesson in a pocket: a thing that does twenty-eight jobs does none of them at the depth where the job actually is.

One thing you would fix about your industry.

Software people keep building things that argue with the person using them. The woman who has kept that build running for nineteen years knows which test is flaky on a Monday, she knows which machine lies about its clock, she knows the one job that has to go last or the whole thing falls over. None of that is in your data and none of it is going to be. So build the thing that hands her a decent first guess and then gets out of the way. Most of the industry builds the thing that tells her she is wrong.

First thing you ever fixed.

A kitchen radio, when I was nine. Dropped off a counter, would not power on. It was a broken wire at the switch and I found it because I had nothing else to do that afternoon. I have not had a materially different experience since.

Something you refuse to repair.

The grey patch in the diner floor. There is a stripe of terrazzo by the door that somebody replaced in the seventies in the wrong colour, and we could have matched it in a week for not much money. We did not. It is wrong and it stays wrong. A building that has had a life should be allowed to look like it has had a life.

What do you tell the scholarship recipients?

I do not, mostly. I do not go. But there is a letter, and the letter says one thing. You do not owe anybody the story. People are going to want you to be a story — the kid from Port Alden who made it — and they will be very warm about wanting it. You can decline that for your entire life and still be perfectly polite. Do the work, take the money, do not perform gratitude for anyone. The money is not a loan taken out against your biography.

Does the comet naming still bother you?

It does not bother me. It is admin. Somebody had to write two surnames in a register and they used the ones that were on the report. Marguerite Adeyemi did the confirming work and she would tell you the same thing about her half of it. The part that stays with me is not the name. Three professional surveys had that object in their data and filed it as noise. It was in the bin and it was fine. That is a much better story than my surname.

Favourite thing on the Anchor & Oar menu.

The chips. They are not good chips. I have had them about two hundred times.

What is in your bag that should not be?

Four hex keys in a size I have never once needed. They have been in there since 2018. At this point they are passengers.

Something you are bad at.

Rooms. Twenty-five people and under, I am fine. Past that it becomes a different job, and Hanne Skovgaard does that job better than I ever will — she takes the conference talks, I take the issue tracker. That is not modesty. It is a division of labour I asked for.

Best advice you ever got, and who from.

A man called Ferro who ran a repair counter on Dunmore Street, around 2010. I asked him how he decided whether something was worth fixing. He said: everything is worth fixing, the only question is whether you are the one who is going to do it. I have used that four hundred times. Most of the things I have said no to, that is the reason.

Why finish something nobody is watching?

Okay. This is the one I actually think about, so you are going to lose some time here. Nobody watched the floodwall get painted. It is eleven weeks on a wall on an industrial strip, and for nine of those weeks the only traffic was two men from the yard and a heron. There is a moment around week six where you understand completely why most murals are half a mural. It is not laziness. It is that the reason you started has run out, and there is nothing left to replace it with, because there is no audience to be embarrassed in front of. What replaces it is smaller than people want it to be. It is not purpose. It is just that you said you would. You made a mark on a list, and the list does not know whether anybody is looking. Here is the part I would actually want somebody to take. If you only finish the things people can see, then over time your standard gets set by whoever happens to be in the room. And the rooms get better as you get older — nicer rooms, better people in them — so it feels like you are improving. You are not. You have got a nicer audience. Finish the one nobody is watching and you find out what your standard is when it is only yours. That is worth knowing. It is lower than you would like, the first few times.

If plait disappeared tomorrow.

A lot of builds break on a Tuesday and somebody has forked the last release by Wednesday, and honestly the fork is the only part that would keep me up, because whoever picks it up inherits ten years of decisions I never wrote down. The code itself — somebody else writes it inside two years and probably writes it better. I would be suspicious of anyone who told you their scheduler was irreplaceable. Me personally, I would go back to a counter. Fix things, sell them, shut on Fridays. I have been quietly aware for about nine years that the garage version of this was not obviously worse.

Last one. What is on the list this week?

Regrade the drain at the back of the diner — not my building any more, but the trust asked. Two code reviews I have been putting off. Get the hives closed up before it turns. And there is a kid’s bike chained on Ferris Street with a bent derailleur that has been there since March, and I have decided that one is mine now.

SUBJECT 61 · RECORDED WEDNESDAY, 20 MAY 2026 · PORT ALDEN

Brandon Cowen Answers 20 Questions in 20 Minutes

Brandon Cowen answered nineteen of twenty questions in nineteen minutes and fifty-two seconds. He had negotiated the right to skip three. He used one.

Subject: Brandon Cowen
Occupation: Software developer & investor
Base: Port Alden
Questions by: Nkechi Vandermolen
Clock: 19:52 of a possible 20:00
Filed: 20 May 2026

The format

1Twenty questions. One clock. It does not stop for anybody.
2No question is sent ahead. No answer is re-recorded.
3The subject may skip up to three. Everything else runs as spoken.

Twenty Twenty puts twenty questions to one person and starts a clock. Brandon Cowen took the chair on a Wednesday afternoon in a back room at the Port Alden library annex and spent most of the first four minutes trying to work out where the timer was. What follows is the full Brandon Cowen Q&A, unedited, in the order it was given.

Twenty questions with Brandon Cowen

01
00:00−19:52
State your name and what you do.
Brandon Cowen. I write software. Some of it is a scheduler people use for free.
02
00:41−19:11
Coffee order.
Black, out of a steel thermos I have had since 2011. It is dented. There is no order — I make it.
03
01:12−18:40
Best thing you have ever put in that thermos.
Soup. Once, in 2019. It was a very good soup and a permanent mistake, because you cannot get soup out of a thermos. It is in there. It is part of the thermos now.
04
01:47−18:05
Worst tool you have ever owned.
A twenty-eight-function multi-tool somebody gave me in 2012. Twenty-eight functions, and the pliers were about the width of a coin. That is the whole lesson in a pocket: a thing that does twenty-eight jobs does none of them at the depth where the job actually is.
05
02:18−17:34
One thing you would fix about your industry.
Software people keep building things that argue with the person using them. The woman who has kept that build running for nineteen years knows which test is flaky on a Monday, she knows which machine lies about its clock, she knows the one job that has to go last or the whole thing falls over. None of that is in your data and none of it is going to be.
So build the thing that hands her a decent first guess and then gets out of the way. Most of the industry builds the thing that tells her she is wrong.
06
03:26−16:26
First thing you ever fixed.
A kitchen radio, when I was nine. Dropped off a counter, would not power on. It was a broken wire at the switch and I found it because I had nothing else to do that afternoon. I have not had a materially different experience since.
07
04:02−15:50
Something you refuse to repair.
The grey patch in the diner floor. There is a stripe of terrazzo by the door that somebody replaced in the seventies in the wrong colour, and we could have matched it in a week for not much money. We did not. It is wrong and it stays wrong. A building that has had a life should be allowed to look like it has had a life.
08
04:55−14:57
The dog or the code. One phone call.
Otter.
09
05:11−14:41
What do you tell the scholarship recipients?
I do not, mostly. I do not go. But there is a letter, and the letter says one thing.
You do not owe anybody the story. People are going to want you to be a story — the kid from Port Alden who made it — and they will be very warm about wanting it. You can decline that for your entire life and still be perfectly polite. Do the work, take the money, do not perform gratitude for anyone. The money is not a loan taken out against your biography.
10
06:40−13:12
Does the comet naming still bother you?
It does not bother me. It is admin. Somebody had to write two surnames in a register and they used the ones that were on the report. Marguerite Adeyemi did the confirming work and she would tell you the same thing about her half of it.
The part that stays with me is not the name. Three professional surveys had that object in their data and filed it as noise. It was in the bin and it was fine. That is a much better story than my surname.
11
07:35−12:17
Favourite thing on the Anchor & Oar menu.
The chips. They are not good chips. I have had them about two hundred times.
12
08:02−11:50
Hardest mile of the Ridgeback 100.
Sixty-three.
[Vandermolen: Not sixty-two? — Cowen: Sixty-two you are still arguing with it.]
13
08:44−11:08
What is in your bag that should not be?
Four hex keys in a size I have never once needed. They have been in there since 2018. At this point they are passengers.
14
09:30−10:22
What went through your mind on the sixth trip into the Dunmore Street warehouse?
SKIPPED
[He shook his head, once. We moved on. Skip 1 of 3 used.]
15
09:52−10:00
Something you are bad at.
Rooms.
Twenty-five people and under, I am fine. Past that it becomes a different job, and Hanne Skovgaard does that job better than I ever will — she takes the conference talks, I take the issue tracker. That is not modesty. It is a division of labour I asked for.
16
10:31−09:21
Best advice you ever got, and who from.
A man called Ferro who ran a repair counter on Dunmore Street, around 2010. I asked him how he decided whether something was worth fixing. He said: everything is worth fixing, the only question is whether you are the one who is going to do it.
I have used that four hundred times. Most of the things I have said no to, that is the reason.
17
11:40−08:12
Why finish something nobody is watching?
Okay. This is the one I actually think about, so you are going to lose some time here.
Nobody watched the floodwall get painted. It is eleven weeks on a wall on an industrial strip, and for nine of those weeks the only traffic was two men from the yard and a heron. There is a moment around week six where you understand completely why most murals are half a mural. It is not laziness. It is that the reason you started has run out, and there is nothing left to replace it with, because there is no audience to be embarrassed in front of.
What replaces it is smaller than people want it to be. It is not purpose. It is just that you said you would. You made a mark on a list, and the list does not know whether anybody is looking.
Here is the part I would actually want somebody to take. If you only finish the things people can see, then over time your standard gets set by whoever happens to be in the room. And the rooms get better as you get older — nicer rooms, better people in them — so it feels like you are improving. You are not. You have got a nicer audience.
Finish the one nobody is watching and you find out what your standard is when it is only yours. That is worth knowing. It is lower than you would like, the first few times.
18
15:20−04:32
If plait disappeared tomorrow.
A lot of builds break on a Tuesday and somebody has forked the last release by Wednesday, and honestly the fork is the only part that would keep me up, because whoever picks it up inherits ten years of decisions I never wrote down. The code itself — somebody else writes it inside two years and probably writes it better. I would be suspicious of anyone who told you their scheduler was irreplaceable.
Me personally, I would go back to a counter. Fix things, sell them, shut on Fridays. I have been quietly aware for about nine years that the garage version of this was not obviously worse.
19
17:35−02:17
Name something you own that was bought new.
A toothbrush.
[Vandermolen: That is it? — Cowen: And the dog food. He did not come with any.]
20
18:58−00:54
Last one. What is on the list this week?
Regrade the drain at the back of the diner — not my building any more, but the trust asked. Two code reviews I have been putting off. Get the hives closed up before it turns. And there is a kid’s bike chained on Ferris Street with a bent derailleur that has been there since March, and I have decided that one is mine now.

TIME19:52

After the clock

Cowen stayed for eleven minutes after the timer stopped, which is longer than most subjects stay and longer than half the interview. He spent nearly all of it on the native bee corridor behind his house, which he had been trying to steer us toward since question three, and which was not on the sheet.

He asked once whether he could revise the answer to nine. Told that he could not, he said that was probably correct, thanked the room, and put his coat on. On the way out he stopped to look at a chair with a loose leg and said nothing about it, which we are choosing to read as restraint.

Questions by Nkechi Vandermolen. Timed by Roscoe Adeyinka-Petit. Recorded and transcribed in one take at the Port Alden library annex, 20 May 2026. Answers are printed as spoken; bracketed lines are the room.