Four baths, kept alive, for as long as we can keep them
We dye with plants, in vats that are years old, on wool and linen. Four colours only — not as a position, but because a living vat needs feeding every week and four is what four people can feed. Weld — the oldest yellow in Europe Reseda luteola, grown two fields away and cut before […]
A billhook that will outlast three handles
The No. 3 is our hedging pattern: a 10-inch blade in shear steel, forged in one heat and edged by hand. It is the hook we make most of, because it is the one people come back for after the first one is worn past re-grinding — which takes about twenty years. Forged in one […]
Six things the fire taught us that the books did not
Most of what is written about forging is written by people who forge occasionally. These are the things that only show up when you light the same hearth every morning for twenty years, in the order we learned them. Sparks mean you have gone too far A bar throwing sparks is burning, not welding. The […]
Four of us, one yard, and no machine that cuts letters
Marrick Stone cuts inscriptions, architectural work and repairs, by hand, in a yard outside Richmond. We turn down more work than we take, mostly because somebody wanted it faster than it can honestly be done. St Cuthbert's — a nave floor slab, recut A ledger stone worn illegible by four hundred years of feet. We […]
How a letter gets cut, from the drawing to the last stroke
People are surprised how little of this is carving. Six stages, and the chisel only appears at the fourth. The first three are where the letter is actually decided. It is drawn full size, twice Once to find the spacing and once to commit to it. Lettering is spaced by eye against the area between […]
Three tides, one river, and nothing under a hundred years old
A gathering of working sail on the Blackwater: smacks, barges and bawleys, sailed by the people who maintain them. No arena, no commentary box, and the programme runs on the tide rather than the clock. Friday — the boats come up on the tide Arrivals from midday, which is to say from whenever the water […]
Know what the water is doing before you need to
Hollis Tide puts a gauge on your wall and a reading on your screen every six minutes. Predictions tell you what the tide should do. A gauge tells you what it is doing, which on a shallow east-coast harbour is a different number often enough to matter. Prediction is not observation Published tide tables are […]
How a small team keeps its documentation current
Documentation rots because nobody owns it, not because the tooling is wrong. These are the habits that keep a body of docs alive, and the ones that only look like progress. Start with the reader, not the tool Most documentation projects open with a platform argument. That is the wrong end of the problem. Before […]
What we changed after a year of on-call
A year of carrying the pager taught us less about outages than about the decisions that quietly made them likelier. Six changes, in the order they paid off. Alert on symptoms, not causes Cause-based alerts multiply as the system grows and go stale the moment it changes. Symptom alerts stay small: is the thing slow, […]
Four ideas that survived contact with customers
Plenty of good ideas die on the way to a real user. These four did not, and the reasons they lasted have very little to do with how clever they were. Ship the smallest honest version A narrow feature that behaves exactly as described beats a broad one that mostly works. Customers forgive missing scope […]