Blog
The Pull Request That Rewired Teams
The Pull Request: How a Simple Ritual Rewired Software Teams
A pull request (PR) is an ask: Please look at my change and help us merge it safely. Simple words, huge implications. PRs turned code review from hallway whispers into a first-class ritual—timestamped, discussable, searchable. They also exported a mindset—collaboration by default—far beyond code (see Code review, Distributed version control). 🧑💻 (more…)
When I Looked in the Mirror One Morning — I Was No Longer the Same Person
One ordinary morning, I walked up to the mirror and for a moment I paused. I didn’t recognise the person staring back at me. It wasn’t that I had changed physically — I looked the same, wore the same clothes, lived the same life. But internally, I had shifted. Something fundamental had snapped into place. I was no longer the same person.
This article explores that moment — that turning point — and what it means to wake up to a new version of yourself. It’s a story, yes, but also a map: how we get to that moment, what happens next, and how you might arrive there too. I’ll use lived experience, reflections, and practical ideas to help turn that mirror-moment into meaningful change.
The Day UTF‑8 Ate the Web
The Day UTF‑8 Ate the Web: How One Encoding Won and Why You Should Care
If you’ve ever seen mojibake—garbled text like ’ and ç—you’ve met the ghosts of competing encodings. The quiet revolution that exorcised them was UTF‑8, a clever way to encode Unicode that made ASCII‑era systems and global scripts coexist (see UTF‑8, Unicode). 🌐 (more…)
The Telharmonium: Streaming Before Streaming
The Telharmonium: When a 200‑Ton Synthesizer Tried to Stream Music by Wire
Imagine dialing a number in 1906 and hearing live electronic music piped into your parlor. No radio. No records. Just electricity reshaped into tone and routed through the telephone exchange. That was the dream of Thaddeus Cahill and his Telharmonium—a colossal, rotary‑powered instrument that tried to invent streaming decades early (see Telharmonium, Thaddeus_Cahill). 🎼⚡
Hook: The Telharmonium wasn’t just an instrument. It was a business model built on physics—and both parts mattered.
The Ballpoint Pen That Wrote the Modern World
• Ballpoints fused thixotropic ink with micromachined balls to make writing portable, cheap, and clean. ✍️
• Patented in 1888, commercialized by László Bíró in the 1930s–40s, mass‑marketed by Bic post‑1950.
• Shaped schooling, bureaucracy, aviation, advertising, and disposable culture; now evolving via gel/rollerball hybrids, erasables, and recycled/refill models.
• Future: solid inks, smart stylus+pen hybrids, closed‑loop refills, and biodegradable bodies.
The Hashtag Before the Feed
The Hashtag Before the Feed: How # Became the World’s Ad‑Hoc Metadata
Long before it grouped memes or movements, # lived quiet lives as pound sign, number sign, and octothorpe. It tagged weights, introduced phone-tree prompts, and sat on typewriter corners. Then social networks turned it into user-generated metadata—a folk taxonomy that routed attention at global scale. 🧭 (more…)
The Zip That Changed Everything
The Zip That Changed Everything: How Zippers Quietly Rewired Clothing, Bags, and Time
You will operate a zipper dozens of times today—coat, jeans, backpack, laptop sleeve—without a second thought. The zip is the metronome of modern life, chopping time into fast closures and instant access. Yet this tiny machine is the product of patents, materials science, standard wars, and ergonomics that took a century to harmonize. 🧷➡️⚙️ (more…)
Why Milk Cartons Look the Way They Do
The Secret Physics of Pour: Why Milk Cartons Look (and Flow) the Way They Do
Open a fridge on any continent and a familiar prism waits: a gable‑top milk carton with a crease that remembers the fold and a roof that pinches into a spout. We rarely question it. But the carton is an argument in laminated cellulose, tuned by paper chemistry, crease mechanics, human factors, and the fluid dynamics of breakfast. It exists because factories need flat stacks, schools need portion control, designers need printable billboards, and you need to pour without baptizing your cereal in a tidal wave. 🥛 (more…)
WC Icons: Design for Universality
Few symbols carry more social pressure than the restroom icon. You’re lost, in a hurry, maybe navigating a foreign script, and you need a sign that translates instantly. That tiny pictogram has to be polite, inclusive, and foundable at speed. This essay explores how restroom icons became a global interface—from silhouette grammar to wayfinding orchestration—and why the best ones disappear into muscle memory. 🚻