Content-oriented index of all wiki topic pages, organized by domain. Updated automatically on every ingest.
Software Engineering
- Hyrum’s Law — with enough API users, all observable behaviors become implicit contracts regardless of the documented spec; the engineering equivalent of entropy
- Psychological safety — the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking; the single most important factor in effective team performance (Google Project Aristotle)
- Trunk-based development — single-branch version control strategy where all commits go to trunk continuously; long-lived branches are an anti-pattern; key DORA predictor of high-performing engineering organizations
- Software Engineering — collected principles, practices, and insights on building software well; includes SE@Google and other canonical sources
- Software Architecture — shape given to a system through component division and arrangement; goals: leave options open, minimize cost, maximize maintainability
- Software System — notes on system design patterns, boundaries, and composition strategies
- Software Architect — role, responsibilities, and skills of the software architect; contrast with developer
- SOLID — five object-oriented design principles (SRP, OCP, LSP, ISP, DIP) for arranging functions and data structures into cohesive, decoupled units
- DDD — Domain-Driven Design: ubiquitous language, bounded contexts, aggregates, and entities as tools for aligning code with the business domain
- Microservices — architectural style decomposing applications into small, independently deployable services; each does one thing and communicates over the network
- Git — distributed version control; branching strategies, workflows, and internals
- Terraform — infrastructure-as-code tool for provisioning cloud resources declaratively; state management and module patterns
Security
- Zero Trust — security model that eliminates implicit network trust; every request verified regardless of origin; replaces perimeter-based defenses
- Cloud Security — network, identity, and data protection patterns specific to cloud environments
- XSS — Cross-Site Scripting: attacker injects scripts into trusted pages that execute in victims’ browsers; impact, types, and prevention techniques
- OAuth — authorization framework delegating resource access via tokens without sharing credentials; OAuth 2.0 flows and RFCs
- Scaling Static Analyses at Facebook — lessons from deploying static analysis at scale: integrate into CI, fix over time, trust signal matters more than volume
- Lessons from building static analysis tools at Google — practical learnings on false positives, developer trust, and incremental rollout from Google’s static analysis program
AI / Machine Learning
- AI — collected resources and notes on artificial intelligence, LLMs, and AI tooling
- — the discipline of building AI systems from mathematical first principles; math-first methodology (derive → code → test → keep artifact); open-source curricula (503-lesson, 20-phase); covers backprop, tokenizers, attention, agent loops
- LLM wiki — Karpathy’s pattern for an LLM-maintained knowledge base: immutable raw sources, LLM-generated wiki pages, and a schema file; ingest/query/lint operations; stateful alternative to RAG at personal/small-team scale
- Claude Code — Anthropic’s AI coding CLI; .claude/ as version-controlled team infrastructure (CLAUDE.md conventions, shared slash commands, settings hooks); home of the Planner-Generator-Evaluator pattern
- Planner-Generator-Evaluator pattern — agentic design pattern decomposing LLM coding workflows into Planner (brief→spec), Generator (sprint-by-sprint implementation), and Evaluator (live-app grading against hard thresholds)
- Claude Code skills — community-shared reusable prompt definitions stored as slash commands; dominant frameworks: GSD (large iterative projects) and Superpowers (small-medium well-defined); also covers multi-agent orchestration (tonone), credential management, and skill design patterns
- Self-improving agents — AI agents that observe their own sessions, log improvement opportunities, and apply those improvements on a schedule; the “meta-skill” pattern; 600+ improvements applied across ~40 skills in the wild
- Session context persistence — pattern for systematically saving decisions, state, and context at the end of each AI session so the next session can resume coherently; the /close skill pattern; memory file taxonomy
Productivity
- Deep Work — cognitively demanding work performed in distraction-free states; essential for acquiring new skills and producing rare, valuable output (Cal Newport)
- GTD — Getting Things Done: capture all open loops, process into actionable next steps, review weekly; reduces cognitive load and stress
- Multi-scale planning — planning at monthly/quarterly, weekly, and daily scales simultaneously; plans are flexible, not rigid commitments
- Boredom — tolerating boredom is a prerequisite for deep work; scheduling internet use and productive meditation as training tools
- Attention Economy — business model that monetizes human attention; design patterns that exploit compulsive behavior; strategies for defensive consumption
- Second Brain — externalizing knowledge and ideas into a trusted digital system to reduce cognitive load and enable creative connections
- Zettelkasten — slip-box note-taking method; atomic notes linked by ideas rather than hierarchy; foundation of the second brain approach
- org-roam — Emacs package implementing a Zettelkasten over org-mode files; ID-based bidirectional links and backlinks
Psychology
- — the tendency to project emotional depth onto machines that simulate listening; foundational case study in human-AI interaction from Weizenbaum’s 1966 chatbot to contemporary AI companions (Turkle)
- — “phone snubbing”: maintaining eye contact while texting; the ambient phone effect degrades conversation quality even when the phone is silent and face-down; dictionary-recognised cultural marker of normalised divided attention (Turkle)
- Safetyism — cultural tendency to prevent all discomfort and risk for children, producing more anxiety and less resilience
- Mean world syndrome — Gerbner’s concept: heavy media consumption inflates perceived danger far beyond actual risk levels
- Overparenting — excessive parental supervision and control that produces higher anxiety, depression, and learned helplessness
- Learned helplessness — passivity and loss of agency produced when effort is repeatedly shown not to matter
- Autonomy-supportive coaching — leadership style that gradually transfers control to the learner, building intrinsic motivation and resilience
- Unstructured play — child-directed unsupervised play essential for conflict resolution, risk assessment, and emotional regulation
Health
- Free-range parenting — granting children age-appropriate independence and unsupervised exploration to support healthy development
- Phone-based childhood — the 2010–2015 transition from play-based to screen-based adolescent life and its four foundational harms: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction
- Antifragility — Taleb’s concept applied to child development: children need exposure to manageable challenge, risk, and failure to grow strong; protection from all difficulty produces fragility, not safety
- Social comparison — chronic upward comparison fueled by social media; the primary mechanism by which Instagram and TikTok harm girls’ mental health during puberty
- Gaming addiction — internet gaming disorder affecting ~7% of adolescent boys (1 in 13); four-group taxonomy (addicted, problematic, engaged, casual); opportunity cost and friendship recession as harms for non-addicted heavy users
- Pornography and adolescent harm — online pornography as a prestige-hijacking harm for boys during the sensitive period for sexual development; Swedish prevalence data, 5:1–10:1 male addiction ratio, interpersonal satisfaction decline
- Anomie — Durkheim’s normlessness concept applied to Gen Z: departure from stable real-world communities into anonymous shifting networks produces purposelessness, despair, and suicide; hikikomori and NEET as downstream outcomes
- Sociogenic illness — illness spread by social transmission rather than pathogens; social media amplifies this via emotional contagion, prestige bias, and audience capture; explains rapid spread of tic disorders, DID, and anxiety among adolescent girls
Sustainability / Political economy
- — nine Earth-system processes defining a safe operating space; six of nine transgressed as of 2023; scientific grounding for the Anthropocene as a civilisational risk
- — Club of Rome system-dynamics model (2022) exploring two futures to 2100: Too Little Too Late (collapse trajectory) vs Giant Leaps (transformation scenario)
- — economic system designed to deliver human and ecological wellbeing rather than maximise GDP; doughnut economics, GPI, and post-growth frameworks
- — thresholds where self-reinforcing feedback loops drive rapid social transformation; Chenoweth’s 3.5% rule; Donella Meadows’ leverage-point hierarchy
- — five interdependent policy packages (end poverty, tackle inequality, empower women, transform food, accelerate clean energy) from Earth for All; the transformation scenario for a stable 21st century
- — Club of Rome’s 1972 system-dynamics model; BAU scenario has proven accurate; Earth4All is its 21st-century successor
Philosophy
- Socratic questioning — interrogative method where probing questions surface hidden assumptions and drive the respondent to construct understanding; applied to software design review via the grill-me Claude Code skill