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- //signalfield note
Field note: May
Smaller weeks, longer essays, and the meeting I should have skipped.
- //tasteessay
Taste is the last moat
When every engineer can ship a feature in an afternoon and every designer can prototype in a sentence, the only thing left to compete on is what you choose not to build.
- //mindessay
The cost of being available
I once calculated, in a fit of late-night rigor, that I had been on call — in some informal sense — for roughly 4,200 of the previous 4,380 days. The number was wrong only in that it was too low.
- //buildessay
The half-life of a good tool
Three categories of tool exist in the working life of a professional: the tool you'll throw out in eighteen months, the tool you'll throw out in five years, and the tool that will, with mild adjustments, outlive you. Almost everyone confuses category one for category three.
- //buildessay
Latency is a worldview
Network engineering as a metaphor for how good thinkers structure their lives. Async, batched, queued, cached — and the one bad path that ruins all of them.
- //learningessay
The half-life of a skill
Three things have a half-life: uranium-238, the enthusiasm of a new hire, and your knowledge of CSS. The third one is the only one most of us pretend isn't happening.
- //mindessay
The second-brain trap
Most note-taking systems are productivity cosplay. Three rules separate the ones that pay rent from the ones that don't.
- //learningessay
The 30-second version of a skill's half-life
Most of what you know expires. The fix isn't to learn faster. It's to learn the part that doesn't.
- //learningessay
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.
- //tasteessay
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.
- //teachtutorial
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.
- //buildarc 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.
- //signalfield note
Field note: April
What I shipped, what I read, what I noticed in a month that did not go to plan.
- //signaldispatch
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.
- //teachtutorial
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.
- //worlddispatch
When to quit a tool
Three signals it's time to leave, even if you spent a month learning it.
- //mindessay
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.
- //builddispatch
The five-line spec
Most features deserve a sticky note, not a doc.
- //buildtutorial
Shipping a killable feature
How to launch something you might delete in two weeks — without breaking trust.
- //signalfield note
Field note: March
The month I rewrote the same paragraph nineteen times and finally let it go.
- //signalfield note
Field note: February
Two outages, one apology email, and a surprisingly good week off.
- //signalfield note
Field note: January
Picking the four bets that would shape the year, and writing them on a wall.
- //mindannual
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.