The Pattern I Kept Building Without Noticing

Altitude: the founder journey

The question in front of me was whether a social post should carry a screenshot or a short clip. That was it. A small decision, the kind you make forty of in an afternoon without thinking.

And somewhere in working it out I noticed that what I was describing — take the recording, pull several different things out of it, keep each one pointing back at the recording — was the same thing my own product does with a meeting.

Then I looked up and found I'd built it a third time, in how blog posts become posts on other channels.

Three is a pattern

There's a principle I've applied in other people's organisations for most of my career, usually while being paid to work out why something keeps going wrong. One bad project can always be explained away: wrong client, wrong technology, wrong team, bad luck. What can't be explained away is the same shape recurring across projects that have nothing else in common. At that point you stop looking for a cause inside any one of them and start looking at what they all share.

I have written some version of that sentence in a lot of documents. It had never once occurred to me to run it on myself.

Three unrelated builds. Nobody asked for a house style. No decision was ever made. And all three came out the same shape, which by my own rule means the cause isn't in any of them.

What the shape actually is

Not "one thing becomes many things." That's just efficiency, and everybody does it.

The part I keep building, without ever having written it down as a requirement, is that every output stays tied to where it came from. A task knows which meeting it came out of. A post knows which source it was cut from. The link home is never optional and it's never dropped for convenience, in any of the three, and I never once specified it.

Which means it isn't a design decision. It's a belief that got into the work while I wasn't looking. Something like: a thing that has lost its origin can't be checked, and a thing that can't be checked shouldn't be trusted.

I'd have said that out loud if you'd asked me. I just didn't know I'd been building it.

The part I'm less pleased about

Here's the uncomfortable half, because a man finding an elegant pattern in his own work is not, on its own, interesting.

I don't know whether this is judgement or habit. Reaching for a familiar shape three times could mean I've internalised something true and keep correctly applying it. It could equally mean I have one move and I make it regardless of the problem in front of me. From the inside, on a good week, those feel identical.

And the test I'd apply to anyone else, I can't easily apply to myself: would I have noticed if the shape had been wrong for one of the three? Or would I have made it fit, been pleased with how neatly it went in, and moved on?

I genuinely don't know. The evidence I have is three cases where it worked, which is exactly the evidence you'd expect in both scenarios.

Where that leaves it

I'm keeping it, for now. Not because I've proved it's right, but because I can at least see it, which I couldn't a fortnight ago, and a habit you can see is a decision you get to make again next time.

The rest of it is a question for whoever ends up using any of this. If the link home turns out to matter, it was judgement. If nobody notices it, it was a preference I mistook for a principle.