# Ideas

> Laws, methods, and mental models that recur across my projects, decisions, and writing.

- HTML version: https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas

### [Adaptive Planning](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/adaptive-planning.md)

Hold the goal steady, treat the plan as a hypothesis, and revise the route as work produces evidence.

### [Amdahl's Law](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/amdahls-law.md)

The serial part of a system sets the ceiling on the speedup available from parallel work.

### [Bounded Context](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/bounded-context.md)

An explicit boundary within which one domain model and its language have a consistent meaning.

### [Code Scaffolding](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/code-scaffolding.md)

Generating repeatable source, configuration, documentation, and project structure from declared inputs.

### [Commit Log](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/commit-log.md)

An ordered, append-only record of accepted state changes that can be replicated or replayed to reconstruct derived state.

### [Computationalism](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/computationalism.md)

A family of theories that explains some or all cognition as computation implemented by a physical system.

### [Context Engineering](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/context-engineering.md)

The design and continual selection of the information an AI model receives so it can act well within a limited context window.

### [Conway's Law](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/conways-law.md)

The structure of a system tends to reproduce the communication structure of the organisation that built it.

### [Critical rationalism](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/critical-rationalism.md)

Knowledge grows through conjecture and criticism, with claims kept open to refutation rather than justified as certain.

### [Data Mesh](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/data-mesh.md)

A decentralised approach to analytical data built on domain ownership, data products, a self-serve platform, and federated governance.

### [Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/directed-acyclic-graph.md)

A directed graph with no path that loops back to its starting node, useful for representing dependencies and executable plans.

### [Domain-Driven Design](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/domain-driven-design.md)

Model software around the language, rules, and boundaries of the problem domain.

### [DORA Metrics](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/dora-metrics.md)

A research-backed set of software delivery measures that keeps throughput and instability in view together.

### [Empiricism](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/empiricism.md)

Experience is the source of knowledge about the external world, while reason organises and draws conclusions from what experience supplies.

### [Epistemology](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/epistemology.md)

How we know what we claim to know, what justifies a belief, and when new evidence should change it.

### [EventStorming](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/eventstorming.md)

A collaborative workshop method for discovering how a domain behaves by mapping events and the forces around them.

### [Falsifiability](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/falsifiability.md)

A claim is falsifiable when some possible observation could count against it, though real tests examine a bundle of assumptions.

### [Feature Engineering](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/feature-engineering.md)

The work of turning raw observations into model inputs that represent the signal needed for a prediction.

### [Feature Stores](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/feature-stores.md)

Systems that define, retrieve, and serve machine-learning features consistently for training and inference.

### [FLP Impossibility](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/flp-impossibility.md)

A deterministic consensus protocol cannot guarantee both safety and termination in a fully asynchronous system if even one process may crash.

### [Goodhart's Law](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/goodharts-law.md)

When a measure becomes a target, pressure to improve the number can break its connection to the outcome it once represented.

### [Human in the Loop](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/human-in-the-loop.md)

An interaction model in which a person contributes to a decision before the system can continue.

### [Human on the Loop](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/human-on-the-loop.md)

An interaction model in which automation acts within set bounds while a person monitors it and can intervene.

### [Incommensurability](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/incommensurability.md)

Rival frameworks may lack a complete common measure because their concepts, problems, or standards differ.

### [Intelligent Document Processing](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/intelligent-document-processing.md)

A pipeline that turns varied documents into validated, structured data by combining recognition, language understanding, and workflow rules.

### [Jevons' Paradox](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/jevons-paradox.md)

Efficiency can lower the effective cost of a resource enough that total use rises instead of falls.

### [Logical empiricism](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/logical-empiricism.md)

A movement that used logic and analysis to connect scientific claims with public evidence and to clarify the role of philosophy.

### [Named-Entity Recognition](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/ner.md)

NER finds spans of text that name entities and assigns them types such as people, organisations, products, or identifiers.

### [NLP](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/nlp.md)

Natural language processing uses computational methods to analyse, transform, and generate human language.

### [OCR](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/ocr.md)

Optical character recognition converts text in images and scanned documents into machine-readable characters.

### [Ontology Engineering](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/ontology-engineering.md)

The practice of defining the concepts, relationships, constraints, and shared vocabulary needed to represent a domain.

### [Paradigm shift](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/paradigm-shift.md)

A scientific community can replace the shared examples, standards, and concepts that organise its normal work.

### [Postpositivism](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/postpositivism.md)

Empirical inquiry can pursue objectivity while accepting fallible evidence, theory-laden observation, and the influence of values.

### [Reverse Conway Maneuver](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/reverse-conway-maneuver.md)

Design team boundaries and communication paths to encourage the system architecture you want.

### [Stream/Table Duality](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/stream-table-duality.md)

A stream can describe the changes to a table, while a table represents the latest state produced by those changes.

### [The Two Generals Problem](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/two-generals-problem.md)

No finite exchange of messages can guarantee agreement when any message or acknowledgement may be lost.

### [Theory-ladenness](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/theory-ladenness.md)

Observations depend on prior ideas about what to notice, how to measure it, and what the result means.

### [Write-Ahead Log (WAL)](https://robbiepalmer.me/ideas/write-ahead-log.md)

An append-only record written durably before the corresponding data changes, allowing a system to recover committed state after failure.

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Markdown index of this site: https://robbiepalmer.me/llms.txt