I built PasadoDocs because I’m a writer first and an engineer second — and both of those halves are here. The first strand is about words: a field guide to eloquence and its dark-mirror twin on how not to argue, a troubleshooting guide for speaking out loud, a satire on killing good ideas, and a short story of my own. The second strand is about systems and measurement — what “quality” really is and how you’d measure it, security turned inside out, the ground rules of running a database, and a curious detour into how the brain predicts a beat.
Inventor Essays — mostly my own words
Inventor Essays
A growing series — mostly my own words. Where you see natural language here, it’s mine: pieces I sat down and hammered out over the years. They fall into two strands — one on writing and the craft of it, one on computing and the hard problem of measuring quality.
This site, measured by its own instrument
The site's own Transcript
Every piece of prose on this site is marked with the same provenance bands PasadoDocs paints in the app — and tallied by a script, not eyeballed. Across all content pages: 77.2% the Inventor’s own words · 3% AI-assisted · 19.8% AI-generated (public-domain quotes & academic citations excluded).
- in-band — the Inventor’s own words
- elevated — AI-assisted from his notes
- off-band — AI-generated
- reference — neither ours; excluded from the %
In the spirit of PasadoDocs, as the weeks pass, I will overhaul all of the AI-flagged text and make it my own. Come back next week, and watch as my Transcript adjusts to reflect my changes. — The Inventor
Measured by scripts/authorship-scorecard.mjs, which parses the provenance
spans in each page’s HTML. The number moves as the writing changes.
On writing
The craft of words: a field guide to eloquence, its dark twin on dishonest argument, delivery out loud, a satire on stifling ideas — and, at the end, some fiction of my own.
Eloquence & Literary Devices
A field guide to the devices that make writing land — from alliteration to the whole rhetorical-question family, each with a plain definition and a vivid example.
Read the field guide →How to Argue Like an Idiot
The dark mirror of the field guide: a catalog of the dishonest moves people make to win an argument. Rhetoric done badly, on purpose — learn to name them.
Read the catalog →How to Speak in Public
Rhetoric stands up and speaks. A troubleshooting guide to the fears and fumbles of public speaking, each problem paired with a fix.
Read the guide →How to Stifle Creativity
A satire: the surest ways to kill a good idea before it can breathe — the photographic negative of everything a creative workplace should do.
Read the satire →The Last Piano
A science-fiction short story — the inventor’s own fiction, offered as a showcase of the craft. A man escapes the most secure prison in the universe the only way he can: by dying.
Read the story →On computing & measurement
Systems, and the hard problem of quality: what quality is and how to measure it, security turned inside out, the ground rules of databases, and the neuroscience of a musical beat.
Six Aspects of Measuring the Quality of Software
The thesis behind PasadoDocs: six lenses on what “quality” even means, and the case that quality is a unit of measurement, not an aspect.
Read the essay →How to be [mostly] Secure
A tongue-in-cheek thought experiment: if breaches can’t be prevented, what if you left nothing worth stealing? Security, turned inside out.
Read the thought experiment →How to run a database: some ground rules
Engineering craft — a short set of hard-won ground rules for anyone who actually runs a database.
Read the ground rules →Predictive beat processing
Filed under science: how the brain predicts a musical beat — a plain-language pass over a neuroscience paper on beat perception.
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