In Inventing on Principle, Bret Victor describes a way of working: find something you believe so strongly that seeing it violated feels wrong, not just inefficient, and let that guide what you make. You don't build a thing because it's a good idea. You build it because the world breaks your principle and you can do something about it.
I didn't plan this collection that way, but looking back, that's how it grew. Each tool answers one principle. Together they're what I mean by calm architecture: systems small enough to understand, that tell the truth about themselves, and that don't need tending.
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A build should be a command I can run myself.
What I saw. CI as a remote machine running its own YAML dialect, starting cold on every build. When it fails, the only way to debug it is to push another commit and wait.
What I made. punchcard The pipeline is mise run ci: the same command on my laptop and on the server, in a workspace that remembers between builds.
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A program should run on the machine with nothing in between.
What I saw. A single static binary shipped inside an image, through a registry, under a container daemon: three new things to run so that one thing can run. Meanwhile systemd sits on every Linux server, already able to isolate, limit and restart it.
What I made. unit It writes hardened systemd units from a short description and deploys over SSH. Nothing new runs on the server.
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Look before you change, and look at the real thing.
What I saw. Tools that change machines without showing what they're about to do, and tools that show a plan, but against a state file that drifted from the machines long ago.
What I made. smed It reads each machine, shows a diff against what's actually there, then applies it. There's no state file; the machines are the truth.
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Nobody should read half a truth.
What I saw. Data pipelines that rebuild tables one at a time, so a reader can catch the database halfway through, and tests that fail after the bad data is already published.
What I made. molt A folder of SQL builds into DuckDB in one transaction, tests included. Either everything is new and tested, or nothing changed.