First principles

A commit lands. The diff shows what changed. It does not show why, or what alternatives were considered, or which assumption turned out to be wrong. The reasoning evaporates. The artifact is all that remains. This site is where the reasoning goes.

Here is an example. This blog is built with a single Ruby script, kramdown for markdown, and static HTML output. No framework, no bundler, no client-side rendering. That choice was not aesthetic — it was a constraint derived from the purpose. The site exists to publish technical writing. Every dependency is a surface for breakage that is not the writing. So the dependency count is: one gem. The build script is 350 lines. The output is HTML files that any server can host.

That is the kind of decision this site will examine. Not “I chose X” but “I chose X because Y, and here is what I considered before arriving there.”

The scope is software architecture, debugging, and tool design. The posts will be long when the reasoning requires it and absent when it does not. There is no schedule.

Two commitments govern what appears:

Show the derivation. A claim without its reasoning is an assertion, and assertions are not permitted here. If the derivation is too long, that is what the post is for. If the derivation does not exist, the claim does not belong.

Revise in the open. When a post is wrong, it gets corrected — not appended to, not abandoned. The revision history is preserved in the git log. What you read is current thinking. What came before is in the commit history.