FOULKES / WORK & IDEAS
The decisions behind
useful software.
Generalized notes from development work and project planning: the problem, the design decision, and what needs to be tested. Client details remain private.
Knowledge assistants: answers are only half the experience.
The problem pattern: a visitor may need a person rather than another automated answer.
The design decision: make human-help requests a clear path, use configured availability rather than guessing, and give the visitor a useful next action.
What needs checking: available and unavailable states, missing information, and wording that could falsely suggest someone is waiting.
Connected workflows: recovery is part of the design.
The problem pattern: a process writes to one system and then stops before it can confirm the full outcome.
The design decision: keep a record of proposed and completed changes, separate reading from writing, and require reconciliation when the outcome is uncertain.
What needs checking: duplicate prevention, partial failures, and whether a retry can safely resume. These are design requirements, not claims that every failure can be prevented.
Business intelligence: keep the source attached.
The problem pattern: a collection of documents contains useful history but lacks a consistent structure.
The design decision: separate extraction, normalization, and expert review before adding generated explanations or recommendations.
What needs checking: units, dates, missing assumptions, and whether comparisons are meaningful. The construction idea in Experiments is an exploratory application of this pattern.
What’s the problem
you want to solve?
Tell me what you’re working around today. I’ll help you explore the options and be straightforward about the skills, information, and next steps involved.