craft
7 entries
Tests as notation rather than as proof
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.
Sight-reading a codebase
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.
The Craftsman
The best account I have read of why "just make it work" and "make it well" are not in tension but are the same instinct at different time horizons.