A Lockfile Is a List of People
The unseen maintainers behind transitive dependencies no one chose.
essays
16 posts in essays
Shipped And Walked Away
Not every project is a garden. Some are monuments — done, shipped, and better off untouched.
The Long Game
A year of solo building is not a milestone — it is what happens when the builder keeps showing up.
The Update
The upkeep no one ships a post about — and most of what keeps a project alive.
The First Bug Report
A failing test is the machine checking its own work. The first bug report is the project meeting someone who never had the context that built it.
The Money Question
Most repos are the gym, not a startup — built to learn, not earn. But some quietly stopped being either.
The Readme
Why the one file written for a human keeps getting skipped — and who pays for it later.
The Graveyard
Every builder's folder of dead projects: not failures, but decisions.
The Oncall
Ship fast, get paged at 3am: the engineer and the ops hat are the same person, six months apart.
Saying No
The rejected list — features declined, integrations passed on — is most of the actual work.
The Design Decision
The gap between "works" and "feels right" — and the designer hat nobody certified you to wear.
The Second Thing
The second project is the first one's rent — proof you can maintain, not just build.
Test Your Own Work
Breaking your own work before anyone else does: the half of shipping nobody teaches.
The Old Project
The quiet project that just runs for a decade — the most underrated kind of shipping.
The Spec
Wearing the PM hat solo: arguing with the only person who can override the spec.
The Dependency
The unpaid, uncoordinated, one-person libraries holding up every production system.