Practice
Shipped work shows the decision. This page is where the reasoning lives: the method I use to keep design and engineering judgment inspectable.
Heuristics Canon — making product and engineering judgment inspectable
The Heuristics Canon is a versioned library of design and engineering rules with stable IDs. A critique names the exact rule it leans on — for example [RLSE-04] or [A11Y-20], used here as illustrative IDs — instead of a preference. The rule text itself lives in the separate, public Heuristics Canon repository; this site shows how selected rules shaped real product decisions.
The Canon runs on real decisions. It decided the pending-media state in Semantic Image Search — an incomplete result set had to name itself as incomplete — and the cross-agent state boundary in WorkBay, where two agents editing the same task needed a stable rule for who owns the write.
Citing a rule ID also means the rule itself can be challenged. If a cited rule doesn't hold up under a specific case, the fix is to correct the rule, and every future citation of it improves with it.
Read the research index for exhibits — order book visualization, rotation matrices — that work through specific engineering problems this way.