Notebook · Law
No surface ships before its write path
A law that came out of a post mortem. Screens that can’t save are demos, however good they look.
Draft for review
A product in my workshop looked finished. The screens were complete, the flows felt real, the details were right. When I audited it, the honest description was a single player demo with a real sign in and a pretend data layer underneath.
Nothing on those screens could fail, because nothing was being saved. So nothing had been tested against the thing that makes software hard: real data, written by real people, read back later.
The rule I wrote afterwards: no surface ships before its write path. A screen is not done until what it shows can be created, stored and changed for real. Design the write path first, then draw the surface on top of it.