Essays

Original writing hosted on Restless Forge. Longer-form thinking about why tools matter, how we value our time, and what it means to build things for the sake of building them.

These are deliberately separate from the tool articles. An article explains how something works — why scanlines look wrong in sand, what an applicant tracking system actually measures, where invoice rounding goes astray. It is tied to a specific tool and is useful mainly if you are using that tool.

An essay is about the project rather than any one piece of it: why a one-person workshop builds free software at all, what the economics actually look like, what gets abandoned and why. They are the writing that would still make sense if every tool here were replaced tomorrow.

There are not many, and that is intentional. Publishing on a schedule produces filler, and there is enough of that already. An essay goes up when there is something worth saying — which in practice means a few times a year rather than a few times a month.

More essays are on the bench. Subscribe on Substack to hear when new ones are published.