What Compose taught me about state

2026-07-02T00:00:00Z

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A workshop is a product

2026-05-14T00:00:00Z

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The first time I ran a hardware workshop I treated it as a talk with exercises bolted on. Twenty people, eight boards, and a plan that assumed everything would work. It did not, and the failure was not the hardware.

What I had actually built was a product with no error states. Every path through the room that was not the happy one simply had nothing waiting at the end of it.

Every unhappy path had nothing waiting at the end of it.

Budget for the refusals

The interesting work is in what the system says when it says no. A board that will not flash, a bay that will not release, a link that drops in the middle of a run.

// every path out of the room needs an answer
when (unit.state) {
  Docked   -> prompt("the bay is still holding it")
  Offline  -> prompt("no link. check the bench")
  else     -> run(mission)
}

Every one of those is content, and it needs writing before the day rather than improvising at the table.

Since writing this

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What someone else said

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Etienne Caron — Writing

What Compose taught me about state

A workshop is a product

Budget for the refusals

What someone else said