The Toolmaker's Lineage

Locally-sourced plain text workflows.

The logic engine was wired early. At fourteen, I walked into the second-floor computer lab at Calhoun Community College in Decatur, Alabama. The year was 1974. Fifth edition Research UNIX had just landed via a free tape from Bell Labs. When I encountered a system where plain text was the raw material flowing through the pipes, the circuit closed. I was hooked.

My father was the real wizard—a Navy Combat Information Center Officer and a relentless polymath. He pulled the strings that put me in front of those terminals, but he was also the man who would stand over a childhood project, split the air with "No, no, you're doing it wrong! Let's start over my way," and dismantle the momentum block by block. He spent his life chasing a better idea that almost worked, eventually drinking himself to death twenty-three years ago.

The ghost remained in the machinery. For decades, I carried the tradition of catastrophic impatience—spending three entire days on an intricate side quest to make a two-hour workflow process run faster, only to lose complete interest in the original goal once the automation was built. The tracking sheets, the multi-layered system reconfigurations, the endless architectural refactoring—it was all just clever red tape to keep from shipping the work.

The remedy was primitive. I stopped fighting the impatience and weaponized it: "I'm too impatient to hack a complex system. Let me get this done right now." I stripped away the bloated infrastructure and returned to the core engine: simple text files managed inside a lightweight text editor, structured manually, written directly to disk. No subscription fees, no heavy dependencies, no abstractions clouding the data.

This is the philosophy of the string. High-flying ideas—kites—are completely useless if they break away into the clouds of over-engineering. You anchor them to the earth with a rough, heavy line of manual execution. You write the text. You stitch the fabric. You clear the floor.

The Rules for the Field

After five decades working inside the terminal, these are the terminal rules I apply to the execution of a life:

1. Keep it simple. It's cheaper and easier to carry around.
2. Do one thing well at a time. Multitasking is a lie told to maximize overhead.
3. Network. You were born to connect directly, node to node.
4. Say what you mean. Nothing is truer than the raw truth.
5. Hack. Trial and error is the only way to learn anything—but keep a voltmeter handy.
6. Be who you are. Even a bent wire can carry a great light.
7. Use leverage. A bigger hammer is rarely the correct engineering solution.
8. Use what you have. Never dig for diamonds with a brick of gold.
9. Have faith. All things are possible, except skiing through a revolving door.
10. Think ahead. But never worship your tracking plans.

The idealized sanctuary: An isolated office off a raised-floor mainframe room, a classic terminal, and zero noise.