Assume It's Load-Bearing
You inherited code with no explanation attached. The safe default is not caution, and it is not confidence — it is finding out.
Blog
The Handoff Is Not an Event
Transfer documents fail because they are written by someone who has already stopped being the owner. The fix is to stop treating the transfer as the moment.
What the Handoff Drops
Work changes hands constantly, and every transfer loses something nobody wrote down because nobody knew it was load-bearing.
The Button That Means Four Things
Delete is the one word in a product that every user thinks they understand and every implementation defines differently.
The Copies You Forgot About
Deleting a record is easy. Deleting every derivative of that record is the part nobody scoped.
Undo Is Not a Feature You Add Later
Everyone agrees users should be able to take it back. The disagreement is about how much the system has to remember, and for how long.
The List That Got Too Long
Every list view is designed against twenty rows and lived in at twenty thousand. Finding things is a feature, and it gets scoped as decoration.
The View Somebody Saved
Once people can filter and search, they start building. What they build becomes shared infrastructure nobody planned to maintain.
They Type What They Remember
Search inside a product fails on the queries people actually make: partial names, misspellings, and the one detail they happen to recall.
Let Them Take It With Them
Export is the feature nobody demos and everybody evaluates. A product that makes leaving hard is not one people commit to.