Some of the earliest memories I have are of maps. I would follow rivers with a finger until they ran out at a coastline, trace roads through villages whose names I couldn't pronounce, imagine who lived there and what they were afraid of. Stars worked the same way. I never learned the constellations properly; I made up my own. Each one had a settlement at its base. That habit, of wandering through imagined geography, has stayed longer than almost anything else from those years.
As I grew older, the medium changed: first essays, then poems, then programs. The wandering didn't. Poetry was the first instrument I had that could hold an imagined thought without distorting it. Programming, when it arrived, turned out to be the second. They felt, and still feel, like the same activity.
I have come, over time, to treat the things I work on as stories. Not loosely, in the way people sometimes call a presentation a "narrative" because it has a beginning and an end. Precisely. A story has a place, a time, people in it, and something they want. So does any project worth doing. The mistake is to forget this halfway through.
By "story" I mean roughly what I've always meant: some imagined thought presented in some medium. Paintings are stories. Poems are stories. Programs are stories. A children's book made for a small relative is a story. A well-designed system is a story. The medium changes; the underlying thing doesn't. The most useful insight I've had in sixteen years of building software is that the same imagined thought can be expressed in many mediums, and that the choice of medium matters less than people tend to think.
This is the part of the site where I write those down. Essays mostly, occasionally something longer, occasionally something off-topic. Notes on architecture, domain languages, the philosophy of building. Notes from the margins: cosmology, history, a poem now and then. Some of these are written for no one in particular, and only become useful later, when someone happens to need exactly that thing on exactly that day. That, too, is how stories work.
If something here resonates with what you are building, or quietly turning over while you wait for tea to cool, please write back. Stories, in the end, want company.
"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." Maya Angelou
Drafted in June 2026
Updated for site in October 2026