About

Hello! I'm Kira. Thanks for visiting this website. I write software for a living and I agree with several big thinkers in our industry that complexity is the single biggest barrier to creating working software. My experience is that over time too many codebases become hard to reason about, difficult to extend, and outright frustrating to work with. This leads to software that is bloated, slow, and full of bugs.

Prior Art is a project I invented for myself in month 11 of pandemic lockdown to try to do something about this instead of just crying about it all the time. It's a surprisingly unpopular topic given the mess we're in, but I've come across plenty of material to keep me busy for a while. At this point I'm still optimistic that it is at least theoretically possible to raise the bar in our industry. Maybe I'll realize that's naive in a few years. We'll see.

My plan is to write here about different topics touching on the general theme of making software better, mostly consolidating and summarizing work that's been done by people way smarter than I am. My ultimate goal is to get the software industry to stop re-inventing the wheel and start focusing on making better software, not just more of it.

My shorter-term, hopefully more realistic goal is to build a collection of resources here on Prior Art to help software developers everywhere get better at what they do.

I hope you'll find something useful here to help you on your journey!

If you're interested in getting to know me better I blog about miscellaneous topics that don't quite fit in here on my personal website.