sage@afterdark~~/archive
·010 POSTS·SORTED · NEWEST FIRST
// the body of work

Archive

Every essay, tutorial, dispatch, field note, arc episode, and annual ever shipped here. Filter by pillar, scan by year, find what you came for.

2026

09 posts
May 04
//learning
essay

Learning by shipping

The fastest way to know if you understand a thing is to put it in front of a user and watch what they do. Tutorials are an inferior substitute for the embarrassment of releasing too early.

May 04
//taste
essay

Taste as a deploy gate

If you can't articulate what 'good' looks like before you ship, you'll spend the rest of the quarter discovering it in production.

May 04
//world
essay

The half-life of a good tool

Every tool you adopt this year will be wrong about something in three years. The discipline isn't picking the right one — it's noticing when a good one has gone bad.

May 04
//teach
tutorial

The system I actually use

The full inventory: every tool, template, and ritual I run my work through. Not the version on the conference talk — the version that survives a Tuesday.

May 01
//build
arc episode

EP 01 · The decision to build in public

Day one of writing the company down as I build it. What I want from this. What I'm afraid of.

Apr 30
//signal
field note

Field note: April

What I shipped, what I read, what I noticed in a month that did not go to plan.

Apr 30
//signal
dispatch

The 30-second rollback rule

If you can't undo it that fast, don't ship it. Make 'undo' a deploy gate, not a guideline.

Apr 29
//teach
tutorial

How to ship a rollback in under 30 seconds

A reproducible recipe for atomic-swap deploys with a working starter repo. No magic, no SaaS, no excuse.

Apr 22
//mind
essay

Why we refuse to ship anything that can't be rolled back in 30 seconds

The seatbelt rule that changed how my team thinks about risk, debt, and the difference between courage and stupidity.

2025

01 posts
Dec 31
//mind
annual

Annual: 2025

What I built, what I learned, what I'd do over. The first complete year of writing the work down as I do it.