THE FIELD REGISTER
Interests are creatures. I pet them, feed them, and sometimes they drag me underground for a season. This is the official register of every hole I've fallen into — the ones I'm still in, the ones asleep, the ones that got away, and the ones I can smell but haven't jumped down yet.
depths approximate · the falling was real
the pull: What if a website grew instead of published? Notes with maturity levels, ideas with root systems.
Maggie Appleton’s essays, Andy Matuschak’s notes, the whole learning-in-public lineage — metabolised into the site you are reading right now.
what survived: solitaryfunc.fyi — the garden, the library, the lab, all of it
The rare hole that becomes a home. Every other hole on this page now lives inside this one.
the pull: How do Hyper Light Drifter and Penusbmic say so much with so few squares? Constraint as a style, not a limitation.
Currently being fed daily. ServerBound’s whole visual identity lives down this hole, and the datafolk on this very site recently grew pixels of its own.
what survived: ServerBound's art direction bible — and now the site's pixel datafolk
Every pixel placed on purpose. The most honest art form for someone who thinks in systems.
the pull: Why does one paragraph feel like a letter from a friend and another like a terms-of-service update?
Editorial layouts, type pairing, the politics of border-radius. Permanently fed. Occasionally it feeds me back.
what survived: This site's design system — Newsreader, Source Serif, DM Sans, Plex Mono on graph paper
Not a hole; a burrow I live in. Precision and warmth are not opposites — that's the whole thesis.
the pull: Why does UI animation need a timeline at all? What if motion were a constraint system that just… resolved?
Constraint-based layouts, spring solvers, reactive dataflow — the study that became Leela, then quietly went to sleep when ServerBound woke up. It will be back.
what survived: Leela — a half-built engine that still whispers
The hole is deeper than it looks. It connects to physics, to layout, to how anything should feel when it moves.
the pull: What is a browser, really, once you take the window away? DOM and JavaScript with no pixels attached.
Built a DOM-only headless browser (no renderer — when I need pixels I borrow Chromium’s). Sleeping, but it earns its keep every week.
what survived: Obscura — my own headless browsing tool, used almost daily
Went in to scrape one page, came out with a utility I now can't work without. The best kind of hole.
the pull: The Mahabharata's unbreakable formation as a game mechanic — what if the maze itself is the antagonist?
A mobile game about entering what you may not be able to exit. Hibernating on purpose — one game at a time.
what survived: A design document and a garden note that still gets tended
Sleeping soundly while ServerBound eats the calendar. Mobile games are patient creatures.
the pull: A story you don't read — you find. Puzzles hidden in plain sight, communities solving them together.
The plan: a cold blue layer under the warm paper of this site, entered through clues, tied to ServerBound’s world. Cloudflare Workers, hidden paths, patient puzzles.
what survived: The Undercroft — a hidden layer planned beneath this site
Caught the scent while planning ServerBound's marketing. The dive is scheduled; the hole knows I'm coming.
the pull: How do a thousand microservices find, trust, and talk to each other without anyone holding a map?
Envoy, Istio, mTLS, the whole choreography of machines vouching for machines. It escaped — or I did — but everything I make now descends from it.
what survived: Four years of teaching it at Tetrate — and the instinct to explain invisible systems
The deepest hole so far. I surfaced a different person: the one who now draws maps of invisible things for a living.
the pull: A 130-year-old delivery network with near-perfect accuracy, run on colour codes and local trains — no computers.
Sorting hubs, handoff chains, error rates that shame software. It became a book chapter and then let me go.
what survived: DataFolks chapter 2 — packets explained as lunchboxes
Went looking for a metaphor, found a whole systems philosophy. The internet works like Mumbai lunch.