A builder's notes, kept at the smallest node.

Why anonymous

buDaoVoid is a handle, not a mask. The work should be read without a résumé attached, and the frame around it should be mine. Anonymity is also a boundary: I write about ideas and systems, not about my family, my school, my city, or my health. Those stay private. What is published here is selected, dated, and reversible.

The name came from a blog I keep under the same handle. The subtitle of both is a single sentence: truth is perpendicular to time. Time is the horizontal axis — the feed, the sequence of events, the résumé. The line I care about cuts across it at a right angle.

What I actually do

Hardware. I spent four-plus years on a storm-drain insert that senses debris and grinds it before a flood. It has a national patent and a novelty report. It also has no installed unit, a sensor that fouls, and a solar panel that sits in the shade. The gap between the patent and the street is the part I keep working on.

Software. I build tools for decisions I cannot make on instinct: a fund dashboard with more than twenty indicators and a scoring engine I no longer entirely trust; a reader that glosses unfamiliar words without replacing the page; a college-selection aid that argues with rankings instead of obeying them.

Systems. I keep a private, versioned archive of how I think: a profile, a memory directory, agent skills, and an archive of conversations. The public site is the part that crosses the line. Most of it does not.

Operating principles

1. Simplify the layers. Paper has one layer between a hand and a mark. An iPad has four. Every layer adds friction, so the first question is which layers carry structure and which only carry delay.
2. Engineer the inertia. Willpower is an unreliable power source. A system that keeps moving when attention fails is worth more than one perfect decision.
3. Start from the broken part. Do not begin with the theory of drainage. Begin with the drain full of leaves, the worker kneeling in the water, and the maintenance schedule nobody read.
4. Publish the method. Show the reasoning and the failures, not only the result. Open the method; keep the private material private.

Coordinates

I look at a lot of painting: Edward Hopper, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Zdzisław Beksiński, Vincent van Gogh. The thread is not style. It is the loneliness of a lit room, the ordinary object made strange, the persistence of a surface that refuses to explain itself.

Music: Radiohead, from Pablo Honey through In Rainbows; Frank Ocean's Blonde. Texts that stay on the desk: Qian Xuesen's On Systems Engineering, Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus.

Toolchain, and what I did not author

I build with Claude Code, Astro, TypeScript, Python, Cloudflare, and Arduino. Some tools in my daily stack are forks or other people's work: Agent Reach by Panniantong, Book-to-Skill by virgiliojr94, and Claude Vision Skill by asuojun. I use and adapt them. I did not author them, and they are not listed as my work.

Contact

Use the contact form for a private message, or the guestbook for something public. There is no newsletter and no mailing list. Replies may take a while.