I announced last week from my main newsletter that I intend to partition my output so that it remains more abstract, personal, and headier, and this new one will concern practical matters related to what I do for a living.

My plan for this newsletter, as it currently stands, is to populate it with things like case studies of past projects, speculations germane to the information-wrangling industries, and updates about my two major software projects, Intertwingler and Sense Atlas. I have also enabled a premium subscription tier, through which I am tentatively planning to publish technical material a software developer, data scientist, UX designer or adjacent professional could use in their work, either in the form of a theoretical treatise, or concrete tutorial.

The premium tier of this newsletter will be part of a “passport” system—​once I write the glue code to do it—​such that a premium subscription to any one of my three newsletters gives you the option of a gift subscription (at least that’s how it’ll work under the hood) to either or both of the others at no additional cost. The other two are:

• The Nature of Software, a serialized book project that endeavours to map the architect Christopher Alexander’s four-volume Nature of Order onto the craft of software development,
• The Making of Making Sense, my personal newsletter, which if this introductory message is landing in your inbox, you’re no doubt familiar with.

The base subscription fee is USD $7 a month. This newsletter and TNoS have a discounted option of $70 per year, whereas The Making of Making Sense is pay-what-you-want, as long as it’s at least $7. Again, a paid subscription to any one of these gives you the option to receive premium issues from all of them. As for cadence, I’m going to try to hit at least one of these with a premium issue every 4-6 weeks. Again, I’m aiming to skew the paid issues for this one mainly toward Web developers, and try to give you information you can use.

Here are a few ideas (and some drafts) I have in the pipe for upcoming newsletters:

• On partitioning one’s social feeds: muted keywords are a terrifically blunt instrument—​and besides, what if you don’t want to mute it but just divert it off to the side? How would you make that?
• Two Intertwinglers: meditating on what appears to be a cleavage plane beginning to emerge in the application server I’m developing.
• Plausible “AI”: when you have doubts about AI but your boss insists on “integrating” it, and you want to be able to tell the truth when you say you did.
• “Digital Sovereignty” transcends both “digital” and “sovereignty”: how controlling your data is essential to steering your destiny.

As I said above, I’m also planning on writing up some case studies:

• Intranets I’ve made,
• content overhauls I’ve done,
• plus the litany of oddly-shaped projects, like a company-wide internationalization rollout, and scanning the entire internet for spammers.

That said, it’s a similar story over and over: solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent. I suppose, however, that the difference is in the details.

Finally, if you are in the biz and chewing on an information-shaped problem and would like a human to help you sound it out, the first call is always free.