Architecting information, new structure for 2025 - At the Edges #1
A new structure for State Transition in 2025
State Transition’s next iteration
For the past few months, I’ve been working on a book project tentatively titled System is as System Does: The Engineer’s Guide to Product Thinking. Not enough has been said about how engineers have power and responsibility regarding the quality of the software they ship. I want to fix that.
I want to share more of the content to get feedback and spark interesting conversations. The first sample chapter is here: How to improve your product intuition.
The original plan was to have a separate substack + a separate list for the book content. Turns out this would be more work for me and more confusing for users, so a bad move all around.
Now, I’ve decided to use Substack’s publication sections feature to divide this site into three separate feeds. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to each as you wish1.
Root Nodes — The primary feed. Every old article is there. These will be the meat of the sites, articles centering around technology, money, and agency.
Derived State — More professional content centered around the topic of the book. If Root Nodes is written by me, then Derived State is written by my worksona: Glenn: Enterprise Edition™️.
At The Edges — short, informal weekly dispatches about whatever bullshit I am on at the current moment.
At the Edges ships every(ish) Friday2. The other two will be more sporadic.
The bullshit I’ve been on at the moment is…
Information Architecture
While working on refactoring some internal documentation, I gave How to Make Sense of Any Mess another read. You can read the book online for free at that URL. I wish I could make everyone read this book.
Content isn’t just about the content we create. How we index it, order it, and organize it matters. The organization gives information context and meaning. It tells people what’s important and what isn’t.
Information architecture requires human intent to take content & data and arrange it in a way that makes it understandable. It involves taste and opinion. You cannot offload information architecture to machines.
Search engines treat all content equally. AI is an attempt to outsource understanding, but it's prone to omissions and hallucinations.
So, what am I saying with the new organization of my writing? The purpose of the book project is to encourage developers to take more initiative and ownership when it comes to the work they share with the world.
The theme of this site has trended3 towards encouraging people to take more initiative and ownership in their careers, their finances, and living under a kleptocracy.
My purpose with writing has been to help others overcome resistance. To get out of their own way. To have more agency in doing work that can be proud of in service of getting what they want and helping who they love.
At the end of the day, it’s all one goal; it’s all important to me, so now it’s all one site.
I’m defaulting everyone to all 3 to start.
Except for the first one, which I’m sending on a Sunday evening. I wanted to get this out before the fresh horrors drop.
I’m realizing more and more themes and “personal brands” are forged not discovered. I didn’t start with these themes in mind, but looking back at following my curiosities, that’s where it’s been.