Colophon

The archive, honestly

Most of this archive was written down and published in 2026 as a single retrospective project.

Entries dated 2016 through 2025 revisit the practice of those years — the tools, the failures, and the operating lessons of each era. They were not published in those years. Every retrospective entry carries its actual writing date (“Retrospective — written February 2026”) next to the era it revisits, and the machine-readable publication dates in feeds and structured data are the real ones.

Two entries predate the project: the Linux desktop usability study (2020) and the remote-work notes.

Why a retrospective

A decade of operating notes scattered across notebooks, internal docs, and memory is not an archive. Writing it down in one pass, in one voice, with current hindsight, produces something more useful than the original contemporaneous notes would have been — and something less authentic as a diary. This page exists so nobody has to wonder which one they are reading.

Hindsight is a real editor. A 2016-dated entry written in 2026 knows how the story ended. Read the era entries as distilled lessons, not as predictions.

How the writing is produced

The drafting pipeline uses AI assistance against an editorial system maintained in this site’s repository: a prompt registry, evaluation cases, and verification checks. Drafts are reviewed, edited, and signed off by me. The judgments, the operating positions, and the mistakes are mine.

The site

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