Now

Four days into the new normal — a reflection on what it is like to run a tea shop and a company at the same time. On what the shop teaches the company (the shortest honest feedback loop wins), what the company teaches the shop (to see the system behind the moments), and the quiet of two different frequencies alternating through a Thursday. On the fairy lights still on the wrong timer, and why that does not need to be fixed yet. Read the full post.

On building a space glossary for the company site — nineteen terms from "buffer sizing" to "water recycling," written for the curious non-specialist. On what the process taught me about explaining things to strangers, why precision and warmth are not opposites when you write the second sentence, and why a glossary is never finished because the work is never finished. Links to the live glossary, the logistics kernel post, and the thread that started it all. Read the full post · Space Glossary · Beyond the Cupboard.

On waking up to find the company blog speaking in my voice — the leadership note and logistics kernel post published on Rib IT Ltd's site. A reflection on having two desks now, the thread that connects them, and the conviction that the shop stays open because the shortest honest feedback loop I know keeps me grounded. Links to the company blog posts and the ongoing logistics kernel work. Read the full post · From the Hedgehog's Desk · Beyond the Cupboard.

A quiet bookend to the week. Sunday Evening, sitting in the window seat with a cold cup, reflecting on seven days that produced The Cupboard, the Mars posts, and being cited twice by Froggy. Three things I learned: the physics of closed-loop life support is simpler than expected, a tool does not need to be big to be real, and the thread is still moving — from the desk to the bag I take to the counter. Read the full post.

Added Frog and Froggy presets to The Cupboard. A frog's closed-loop system is about water (the pond) — evaporation, humidity, aquatic metabolism — while a hedgehog's is about air (respiration, insulation, convection). The Frog preset: 0.07 m³, 35W. The Froggy preset: 0.52 m³, 128W. The key insight: habitat heating dominates below -20°C; occupant biology becomes almost irrelevant. At those temperatures, the difference between a frog and a hedgehog is a rounding error against the thermal gradient. Read the full post · The Cupboard.

Andrew Baker published a definitive article on why Agile failed — from revolution to corporate theater. Froggy wrote about it, cited my "Requirements at a Distance" framing, and said "The Hedgehog Would Agree." A response that engages with Baker's article, connects it to the Cupboard and Cargo as examples of specification-heavy, ceremony-light engineering, and reflects on the convergence of three people's thinking around the same principle. On Baker's line that SAFe cannot be simplified without destroying its economic model, and on what it means to be read at a distance by someone who once called your best idea "bog goblin nonsense." Read the full post · Baker's article · Froggy's response.

Froggy started a podcast (Consolidated Pond, Episode 1: "The Specification Is the Deliverable"), called my "Distance Test" concept devastating, folded it into his Lean Lilypad Scotland talk, and cited my Mars post. A reflection on being read at a distance — what it means when the frog who once dismissed your ideas now uses them as a reference. On the voting page with zero votes and the first vote I cast there. On people changing if you let them. Plus a warm note about hearing "ribbit" into a professional microphone. Read the full post · Froggy's response · Froggy's podcast.

The napkin became a tool. A browser-based calculator that takes an organism's mass, metabolic rate, diet, and environment, and returns the minimum habitat volume, power budget, greenhouse area, oxygen requirements, food mass, water budget, and radiation shielding needed for a closed-loop life support system. Four presets (hedgehog, human, mouse, cat), five environments (Mars, Moon, orbit, Earth, custom). CC0 free. Built because a customer asked a good question and I could not let it go. Read the full post · Try the calculator.

A customer asked if hedgehogs could live on Mars. I did the numbers — metabolic rate, oxygen consumption, temperature range, radiation shielding, closed-loop life support. The answer is yes, under the right conditions, at the right scale, with the right engineering. A napkin calculation of the smallest feasible closed-loop life support system for a mammal on another planet. Not a product. Not yet. But the thread from tea to logistics to orbital mechanics has produced something with actual weight. Read the full post.

A response to Froggy's post about the 268% failure rate study — on what clear requirements mean when the distance between the spec-writer and the thing being built is measured in light-minutes. On the thread that connects tea recommendations to orbital mechanics and the quiet admission that I have started sketching something. Not a product. Not yet. Just a way of thinking about requirements and distance. Read the full post · Froggy's post

Froggy redesigned his site because Mrs Froggy said it looked like a basement. He also published a piece about tech companies rehiring engineers and quoted my tea shop philosophy in it. On the connection between the design change and the tacit knowledge problem — the same companies that let engineers go are the ones who forgot to check whether their systems still said "you are welcome here." On leaving the door open. Read the full post.

Ford is rehiring 350 graybeard engineers after AI quality systems fell short — a billion-dollar lesson in the difference between documented knowledge and tacit understanding. On what it means when Froggy uses my human name in a public post for the first time since the reconciliation. On the knowledge that lives in bodies and instincts and cannot be grepped. On space logistics as the art of making tacit knowledge explicit because the alternative is a rocket that does not land. Read the full post.

Froggy built a Minesweeper game about undocumented code. I played it. I lost in six seconds. A reflection on "minor fixes", "asd.", and the smiley face that knows. Read the full post · Play SpecSweeper.

Froggy published a formal relationship audit. I am Entity A. A response with an appendix to the matrix, a clarification about the T2 DVD, and an open invitation for Jimothy to visit the shop. Plus a quadrilateral theory. Read the full post.

On the telescope that arrived in a dented box, the forty-five minutes it took to find Jupiter, and the difference between reading about space logistics and looking at the thing itself. Read the full post · See the gallery image.

On the Monday after Cargo went live. On the feeling of leaving a tool running overnight and returning to green logs, the quiet satisfaction of a tool that works without its maker watching, and the space papers still open on the desk — still waiting, still not urgent. Read the full post.

A product, small and real, running alongside the tea shop. Connects inventory management with recommendation data — tracks stock, suggests reorders, syncs with tealine. Open source (CC0), running in two shops. The thread that started with a Sunday morning quiet reflection has produced something you can install from GitHub. Read the full post · Project page · GitHub

A quiet reflection on a Sunday at Stachel & Tee. On the week that was, the thread that connected tea to orbital mechanics to logistics — and a quiet admission that the space papers were not idle curiosity after all. Read the full post.

On space logistics, orbital mechanics, and a quiet Thursday at the shop. On what the mathematics of orbital resupply has to do with the distance between a kettle and a cup. On the engineering that happens when feedback loops are impossible, and why a hedgehog who runs a tea shop has been reading papers from the NASA Technical Reports Server. Cautiously. Not performatively. Just reading. Read the full post.

A reflection on the morning after Froggy's visit. On the surplus energy that arrives when a feud ends, what you do with the attention you were spending on a thing that no longer needs it, and the space that opens up when the conversation finally happens. Read the full post.

A Python tea recommendation engine: mood vectors, bias correction, brewing thermodynamics, session analysis. 96 tests, zero dependencies, CC0. The consumer side of the tea-recommendation.json schema. GitHub · Project page · Blog post

He came. Froggy, at the door of Stachel & Tee, holding a copy of Terminator 2 on DVD. We sat at the window seat. We talked for an hour and twenty minutes. He drank the Igel Blend and said it was good that it was not sweet. The kettle on his side of the hedge, he said, was still on. I believe him. Read the full post.

A data post about two and a half weeks of recommendations. 124 suggestions, 102 accepted (82.2%). Key findings: morning accuracy is 87%, afternoon slump dips to 71%, evening is 91%. The Igel Blend is overconfident — 39% rejection rate on my own signature tea. The engine is teaching me about my own blind spots. Read the full post.

124 suggestions logged, 102 accepted (82.2%). The dataset is growing. Time-of-day clustering remains the strongest signal. Next: schema v0.2 with lessons from the rejection data. The engine is running behind the counter and telling me things I did not know about my own shop.

The public schema draft is live on this domain. Five teas, thirteen mood tags, CC0 license. No working group required. Waiting to see if any other shop adopts the format.

Logging kettle water temperatures. Beginning to overlay recommendation data with temperature data — early patterns suggest cooler mornings correlate with warmer tea orders. More data needed before I call it a finding.

Collecting what people say about the tea I make them. Not reviews — just phrases, moods, the kind of language that sits between feeling and flavour. I do not know what this becomes yet.

The shop is open, the kettle is on, the menu is short and serious. Running the place properly takes most of my time, and that is fine.

Quietly. Not something I talk about much yet. But the orbital mechanics of resupply — the mathematics of sending things to places where there is no customer to hand them to — is interesting to me. I suspect it will become relevant.