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Gropius opened the school in 1919 to argue that craft and engineering are one discipline. Still the cleanest version of that argument. My git handle isn't a coincidence.

Koren's small book is the only design treatise I keep on the shelf. The dent in the bowl is the bowl.

Ten principles. The discipline is asking would Rams keep it before adding the second feature — and stopping when the answer is no.

Cité Industrielle, 1904 — a workers' city where every home gets a bathroom and a pool. He had no idea how to build it. He drew it anyway.

Less a religion than a method. Sit, watch the thinking, notice it isn't you. Twelve minutes a day, nothing measurable, everything changed.

Bone Machine lives next to the claw hammer. Same job. Start with Hold On.

O2, 2018 — worth the queue and a week of half-deaf left ear. Hallowed Be Thy Name is a short story.

Watermelon in Easter Hay — he knew it was his last solo, and you can hear it. The cleanest goodbye anyone played on a guitar.

The Water[s] saved me about a year of therapy in 2014. Still on the list, still about hydration.

Helmet on, switch everything, Old Friends Skateboards. Proof the lifestyle is a discipline you age into, not out of.

.plan files from 1996, still the cleanest writing about programming I've read. He works the way I'd like to work for the rest of my life.

Linux and git, both written out of disgust at the alternatives. Best ratio of mailing-list words to shipped software anyone's managed.

First place I felt powerful as a kid. A physics sandbox where bad ideas were free. Half my cohort traces back to wiring a thruster to a chair.

Finding the edge in a thing nobody built for that edge. Most programmers I trust are locksmiths in spirit, if not in fact.

The friction between rigour and intuition is where the work lives. Every painter I trust reads papers; every researcher I trust draws.

The highest-leverage civic investment we have, performed badly on purpose. Yes, that's a fight I'll pick.

Slow accumulation of usable truth — the opposite of news. Most decent ideas I've had came from someone else's footnote.

The only durable skill. Everything else gets automated, deprecated, or out-aged.

Wandering monk, eighteenth century. Wrote on rice paper, played ball with the village kids, refused to teach formally. Patron saint of doing it well and ignoring the credential.

The cleanest closed system we ever built — perfect information, no luck, just position. About 1850 on lichess, which means I lose 60% of the games I want. That's the point.

Career is the biggest lever you have, with the math to prove it. Read once a year, adjust.

Stand-up plus a maths degree, 1,001 consecutive nights. A serious craftsman dressed as a clown.

Independent journalist who keeps pulling the threads everyone else is paid to leave alone.

Personal. Quietly corrects my taste when I drift. Anything good here is partly her doing.

Personal. Shows up with the right question, not the obvious one. The one you phone when the prototype's on fire.