Workshop
Half-formed things. Nothing here is finished and nothing here is promising to be. Parked is a legitimate end state.
Twenty-four keys
Started as a note about whether constraint-driven practice (write it in all twenty-four keys) generalises. Turned into the metronome piece instead, which is the same idea from a more useful angle.
Tests as notation rather than as proof
Half-formed: a test suite is read far more often than it fails. So its primary job might be notation — telling a reader what the thing is supposed to do — rather than proof. If that is right, then a test that is thorough but unreadable is failing at its main job while passing its stated one.
Not sure this survives contact with a real flaky-test incident.
The honest empty state
Empty states almost always say something encouraging. Almost none of them say why it is empty, which is the only thing the user actually wants to know: nothing has happened yet, versus a filter is hiding everything, versus it failed to load and we are pretending.
Three quite different situations, one cheerful illustration.
Sight-reading a codebase
Sight-reading is a trainable skill distinct from playing: you learn to look ahead, to fake the inner parts, to keep going through a mistake rather than stopping to fix it. There is obviously something here about reading unfamiliar code.
Parked because every version I write collapses into “skim first, then read properly”, which everyone already knows and does not need a metaphor for.