Code and Civilisation
RSS FeedCode has become one of the principal instruments of modern civilisation. It shapes institutions, mediates trust, and quietly determines how collaboration is organised at scale.
This blog is a place for reflective essays on software, systems, and public institutions — written from the conviction that progress depends less on novelty than on judgement, restraint, and understanding. Begin with the founding essay below, or explore the posts as they accumulate.
Recent Posts
The Contract as Data: How ISDA Rebuilt a Market's Paperwork
Updated:How the derivatives market turned a library of paper contracts, strained by every crisis from the 2005 backlog to Lehman to lockdown, into named clauses, versioned definitions, an open shared model and executable rules, and what a new payment scheme can learn from it.
Change Management as Civic Infrastructure
How change management ceases to be a bureaucratic burden and becomes the architecture of institutional trust.
Civilisation XIV: The Invisible Commons
Updated:A speculative ‘Episode 14’ of 'Civilisation' in the spirit of Kenneth Clark, observing how courtesy, discipline, curiosity, conscience, and patience shaped the invisible civic infrastructure of the digital age.
From Meetings to Artefacts: A Different Kind of Alignment
Updated:How shared artefacts, version control, and Markdown replace meeting-driven alignment with durable, traceable institutional knowledge.
Git as Institutional Memory
Updated:Why Git is not a developer tool, but the substrate of institutional memory, governance, and accountability.
Élan: An Introduction
Updated:An introduction to Élan, a workbench for uniting intent, structure, and execution in complex systems.
Markdown as Institutional Infrastructure
Updated:Why Markdown and Git are not developer tools, but the quiet infrastructure of durable institutional governance.
On Code, Institutions, and Judgement
Updated:On code, institutions, and the quiet work of building civilisation.