Bach kept notebooks — of exercises, of pieces copied out to understand them, of the same idea written again and again until it gave up what it was for. This is mine: notes, studies, and variations on design and the things worth paying attention to.
Recent
The inner voices
The signals nobody looks at — focus order, live regions, the alt text — are the ones holding the texture together. A third pass at the counterpoint idea.
What the metronome teaches
Practising with a metronome does not teach you to play in time. It teaches you where you were already speeding up, which is a different and more useful thing.
Two voices
A year of applying the counterpoint idea in practice, and the part I got wrong: independence is not the goal, it is the constraint.
Against the tidy changelog
A changelog that reads as though the work went in a straight line is a changelog that has thrown away the only information worth keeping.
Counterpoint for interfaces
Interfaces fail the way bad counterpoint fails: not because any single line is wrong, but because two lines that were fine apart stop being fine together.
From the workshop
Rough ideas, kept rough. Some of these become posts; most do not.
Twenty-four keys
Tests as notation rather than as proof
The honest empty state
Sight-reading a codebase