Small, durable bits worth living by.
Bits to Live By is Quintin Orsmond’s independent engineering publication and lab. It explores how software is built and why, builds tools for problems that come up in real engineering work, and publishes what it finds with the reasoning and the evidence.
What you’ll find here
- Projects
- Methods, tools and experiments, each documented with what it does, the design decisions behind it and what it doesn’t do yet. So far there are two methods: FeatureKit, a way of working for AI coding agents, and Baseline, Tokens, Layouts, Behaviors, a way of structuring CSS so a product keeps up with its design system.
- Writing
- Explanations that go past the surface: how something works, why it was built that way, and where it stops working.
- Experiments
- Trials with a question, a method and a result, written up whether or not they worked. Some of the most useful results so far are reversals, and FeatureKit’s changelog records several.
Standards
- A number comes with its source and its limits. If it came from three runs on one model, the page says so.
- Illustrations are labelled as illustrations. Examples taken from real output say where they came from.
- Project documentation is generated from the project’s own repository, so it describes the version you install.
- Live examples run the project’s published code, not a copy made to look like it.
- Old links keep working.
From me
I started Bits to Live By in 2021 as a place to write down simple bits on getting stuff done: short explanations of React Hooks and React Native layout. Those articles are still here, at the addresses they always had.
It has grown into the place where I work things out properly. Both projects came out of problems I kept running into in real product work: coding agents that write fast and leave a mess behind, and products that drift out of step with their design systems. Each one is something I use, keep refining, and am proud enough of to publish with its reasoning and its evidence, including the parts that didn’t work. This site is built with them too.
If something here helps you, or you think I’ve got something wrong, I’d love to hear about it. You’ll find me on GitHub, and more about me at quintinorsmond.dev.
Quintin Orsmond
Follow along
New articles and project releases go out through the RSS feed. Project code lives on GitHub.