Notes on the craft of software
Essays on design, engineering and process — published as a living demo of cross-collection relations: every post belongs to many tags, and every tag knows its posts without storing them twice.
Latest from the desk
The four most recent essays, pulled live from the posts collection and sorted by date.
Designing with constraints, on purpose
Every strong interface we have shipped started with a constraint we refused to negotiate away. Here is how we pick them.
The boring stack is a feature
We rebuilt our pipeline on tools nobody tweets about. Deploys got faster and the on-call channel went quiet.
Write the README first
If you cannot explain the tool before building it, you are about to build the wrong tool. A practice we stole from technical writers.
Tokens, not pixels
The day we deleted every hardcoded hex value was the day dark mode became a data change instead of a rewrite.
Small, deliberate, linked
Pick a thread, pull it
Every post links to its topics and every topic links back to its posts. That is the whole demo — and the whole point.