Welcome, I suppose
Most of the tools I use were designed by people who don't speak my language, for users who don't look like the people I'm building for. This is a blog about what that means, and what it costs.
There's a specific kind of silence you learn to hear when you work in software long enough. It's the silence of assumptions that nobody had to state because everyone in the room shared them.
When I open a code editor, the autocomplete speaks English. When I read a design system, its examples use Helvetica or Inter and Latin lorem ipsum. When I reach for a UI library, its components assume left-to-right reading, Roman characters, ample horizontal screen space, and names that fit inside 24 pixels of height. When I search Stack Overflow, the questions and answers come from a particular culture of debugging, fast, direct, impatient, confident that there is an answer.
None of this is bad. Most of it is the accumulated work of brilliant people solving real problems. But it is not neutral, and pretending it's neutral is how you end up with software that works beautifully for some people and excludes others without anyone ever deciding to exclude them.
I'm a software engineer. I work on connected applications for electric motorcycles.
What I think this blog is for
I'm not writing this blog to complain about how software excludes people. That would be boring, and it would be the wrong genre, lots of people write that genre, many of them better than I could.
I'm writing it to document the work of building software that doesn't do that, in specific cases, with specific technical decisions.
This work is mostly invisible. It doesn't fit neatly into "tips and tricks" letters or framework tutorials. It doesn't optimise for SEO. It doesn't scale as engineering content the way a Rust benchmark or a Kubernetes architecture diagram does.
But I think it matters, for a reason I'll state plainly: software is an artifact of its makers' assumptions, and the world has more kinds of users than any one culture's assumptions can hold. If you're building something that will be used by people who don't look like you, don't live where you live, don't read what you read, you owe them the specific attention of noticing what you assumed without noticing.
That's the claim. That's what this blog is about. The letters that follow will be concrete but they'll share this common root. When a tool doesn't fit, I want to notice why, and write down what I did about it.
I don't expect to be right about everything. I expect to be wrong in public, repeatedly, and to correct myself in later letters. That's fine. The alternative is silence, and silence is how the default assumption wins.
Welcome, I suppose. Make yourself at home.