Writing
What shipped, and what it cost
Decisions, mistakes, and the reasoning behind both — written close enough to the work that it is still specific. Dated, so you can see how old it is.
The missing field that could erase your timezone
An omitted timezone field looked harmless until an independent review showed it could erase a couple's saved choice. The repair was small; the contract was not.
- building-in-public
- engineering
- data-integrity
Four words per line
A post page on a sibling product rendered its body text about four words wide on a phone. It had probably always done that. Nobody had ever opened it at 390 pixels.
- typography
- mobile
- testing
It took five attempts to scaffold this site
I have a generator that scaffolds a new product from a vision file. I ran it by hand instead of handing it to an agent, specifically so I could watch it fail. It took five attempts and surfaced six failure modes, and not one of them was written down anywhere.
- building-in-public
- tooling
- failure-modes
- agents
The llms.txt I shipped was wrong
I hand-wrote a machine-readable summary of a product from memory. It described capabilities that had not shipped, and it was wrong the day it went live. The fix was not proofreading.
- llms-txt
- honesty
- testing
Why this site exists
Most build-in-public writing is either hype with no numbers or numbers with no reasoning. This is an attempt at the third thing, and a note on what I have had to give up to do it.
- building-in-public
- meta