October 20, 2025
Everything is a File: Applying Unix Philosophy to Modern Data Management
How virtual filesystem interfaces turned my scattered data tools into navigable, composable systems
Software-Design
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January 20, 2025
Mathematical Elegance in Software Design
The best software I’ve written has mathematical elegance—not because it uses advanced math, but because it embodies mathematical principles of abstraction, composition, and invariants.
What Mathematical Elegance Means
In mathematics, elegance …
January 6, 2025
Long Echo: Designing for Digital Resilience Across Decades
Not resurrection. Not immortality. Just love that still responds. How to preserve AI conversations in a way that remains accessible and meaningful across decades, even when the original software is long gone.
November 15, 2024
Why I Build Comprehensively in Open Source
I maintain 50+ open source repositories. Every one has documentation, tests, examples, and clear architecture.
People ask: “Why spend so much time on free software when you have stage 4 cancer?”
The question misunderstands what I’m …
April 22, 2019
API Design as Value Imprinting
I’ve been thinking about how API design encodes values—not just technical decisions, but philosophical ones.
Every interface you create is a constraint on future behavior. Every abstraction emphasizes certain patterns and discourages others. …
February 20, 2016
The Unix Philosophy and API Design
I keep coming back to the Unix philosophy: do one thing well, compose freely, use text streams.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a design principle that scales from command-line tools to library APIs to distributed systems.