The essays below are research notes, summaries and compressions of ideas I am curious about (or have cared for at some point). They serve as a memory and reference for talking about these subjects.

Disclaimer

All articles are evolving documents that are reshaped as new information, understanding and time permit.

The essays are also an experiment: Some texts have been processed by a large language model to perform various changes, transformations and corrections. In most cases the model was used as a shortcut to create a readable synthesis of notes, context discovery and exploration of counterfactuals. The substantive basis of all texts is my own and represent my judgement of what is important (unless noted otherwise). As such these texts raise an interesting question of how we detect such processed information that is worth our attention when everyhting looks equally polished.

If you don’t care for this sort of translated information. Look elsehere.

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License: All content on this site is free to use so long as you provide suitable attibution: CC-BY.

The Reality Principle in Software Design

Software design is justified only when its benefits survive actual maintenance conditions. This essay identifies the three forces that govern real codebases — bounded cognition, local change, and identity clarity — and derives an operational model from their interaction.
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What a Game Can Be

A field guide for extracting viable game concepts from any source material. Six gates test whether a subject contains playable pressure, a classifiable loop, and a core primitive one person can prove in two weeks. A concept that survives the process speaks for itself — it aligns the team, resists drift, and makes bad decisions obvious.
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The Benefits of Failure

A track record of failed, mediocre, and underfunded projects does not disqualify a person from excellence. For those who pay attention, failure can be a brutal education in what excellence requires, but only when its lessons are tested against higher standards rather than romanticized.
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Wicked Problems

Small studios rarely fail because they lack advice. They fail because several correct pieces of advice apply at once, conflict with each other, and are filtered through limited money, limited capability, and misaligned incentives. This essay identifies recurring failure patterns and practical responses.
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What we do Here Today Will Echo in Eternity

Every project ossifies. Decisions harden into structure whether the process is managed or not. This article explains the mechanism, traces it from first sketch to post-launch community, and describes how serious teams use it deliberately.
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Hiring for Games

There is no generic ‘good hire.’ A good hire fills a gap that actually exists, augments the studio’s DNA, and can operate inside a tight production loop. At scales of 4–40 people, every person is load-bearing. This essay is about who to bring in, how to evaluate them, when to exit them, and why extraordinary skill—however it emerges—cannot be replaced by process alone.
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Studio DNA

Studios accumulate institutional DNA: habits of taste, production reflexes, blind spots. That DNA describes what the team has learned to do and what it hasn’t needed to learn. A way to read the pattern.
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The Price of Seeing Clearly

Mindset change is not a decision. It is a wound that heals in a new shape. Why the shift cannot be willed, only survived.
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The Dream That Won't Compound

What happens when a small studio has the right aspiration but the wrong operating system—and how comfort becomes the most expensive thing in the building.
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Why Things Compound

Why do small early differences turn into huge later gaps? Why do equally talented people end up in different places? A systems model of how outcomes diverge.
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