“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
— Terry Pratchett, Diggers
Welcome to FieldTested—a place where methods meet reality, and reality has a habit of being messier than we’d like to admit.
If you’ve stumbled across this corner of the internet, you might be wondering what makes this different from the thousands of other technical sites out there. The short answer: I’m not here to teach you anything.
That probably sounds strange coming from someone who just launched a blog, but hear me out.
What This Place Actually Is
I’m sharing my way. My approaches, my reasoning, my successes and failures—along with the context in which they happened. Think of it as opening my toolkit and explaining not just what each tool does, but why I chose it and what trade-offs I accepted to use it.
Every technique I discuss here has been field-tested. Not in the pristine environment of a tutorial, but in real projects with real constraints. Projects where the deadline was yesterday, the legacy system couldn’t be touched, and the requirements changed three times during implementation.
These aren’t academic exercises—they’re battle scars with stories attached.
The “It Depends” Philosophy
Rather than telling you what to do, I want to show you how I think through problems. When I write about a particular approach, I’ll share why I chose it over alternatives, where it worked well and where it didn’t, and what I’d do differently knowing what I know now.
My hope is that seeing this reasoning process helps you develop your own. Not so you can copy my decisions, but so you can make better decisions for your unique situation.
The tech industry loves its absolutes—“best practices,” “proven methods,” posts titled “The Right Way to Do X.” But context is everything. The more experience I’ve gained, the more suspicious I’ve become of any advice that doesn’t start with “it depends.”
Who This Is For
This blog is for people who understand that there’s no such thing as a universal solution. Who appreciate seeing the reasoning behind decisions rather than just the final answers.
Whether you’re just starting your technical journey or you’ve been building things for decades, there’s value in seeing how someone else approaches problems—not as gospel, but as one data point among many.
What to Expect
I won’t be following a publishing schedule. I’ll write when I have something genuinely useful to share—when I’ve learned something worth documenting or discovered an approach that surprised me with its effectiveness.
You’ll see a mix of approaches—sometimes deep dives into technical problems, sometimes broader perspectives on tools and workflows. The format will match what’s most useful for the topic at hand.
An Invitation
The goal isn’t to convert you to my way of doing things. It’s to give you another perspective as you develop your own approaches. To share what I’ve learned so you can learn from both my successes and mistakes.
So welcome to the field test. Feel free to take what’s useful, ignore what isn’t, and most importantly—go build something interesting with whatever you learn along the way.
The real learning happens when you put these ideas to the test in your own unique context. That’s where the true field testing begins.
Thanks for taking the time to understand what FieldTested is about. Now go build something interesting.