WordloopFoundations
The ideas that shape how we think about software before any specific technology choice enters the conversation.
Foundations
Foundations are the ideas that shape our engineering before any specific stack, service, or feature enters the conversation. They are deliberately stack-agnostic — the same principles should hold whether we are writing Go, Python, or TypeScript, whether the target is a backend API or a frontend surface, whether the change is large or small.
Four pages live here:
Product Engineering
Outcomes over outputs, shaped work, appetite-based planning, and the relationship between engineering and user impact.
Code Craft
Simplicity, readability, the discipline of deletion, and the refusal to build for hypothetical futures.
Documentation
Docs as a product, dual-audience architecture, debt-aware ADRs, and diagrams-as-code.
Testing
Continuous Risk Assurance — testing the system, not the mock of the system.
Read these before reading anything else in the principles hub. They are the filter through which every subsequent decision makes sense.