8 posts
I typed my thirty-two loops, then drew them as a graph, and thought the loop was the top of the system. It turned out to be the roof of a stack eight floors deep, and the floor holding all the weight is the smallest one: the edge.
I gave every job in my automation a receipt, a health check, and a green light, and the system still would not fit in my head. A dashboard shows the state of the parts. The question I actually had was about the shape of the whole, and no amount of state answers a question about shape.
The best thing anyone told me about my own system this year was that I had not invented it. The scripts I grew by hand are a data pipeline, the shape is a DAG, and the discipline is solved. What the tools actually sell, why I am not buying yet, and the difference between wanting an engine and wanting a map.
Thirty-two automated jobs run underneath my days, I wrote every one of them, and I could not hold the system in my head. The problem was never my memory. It was a word. "Loop" was one word doing the work of seven.
I had thirty-three git repositories and treated all thirty-three as if they were on fire. The fix was not more discipline or a better tool. It was a census: an inventory, an edge, and a rule for what counts as alive. Domain cartography applied to my own sprawl.
The hardest part of mapping a complex domain is the blank page. Here are the six layers I run every domain through, from primitives to levels, with the question each one answers, how to actually do it, and the failure mode that shows up when you skip it.
Domain cartography is the practice of charting a complex domain you have to live and act inside, until it is legible enough to navigate. Not making it simple. Making it readable. Here is the field, the method, and the six layers every map needs.
Coherent complexity is what you get when a complex system is made legible without being made simple. You do not reduce it. You map it, until you can move through it on purpose. A field guide to the practice, and the idea behind everything else I build.