Cass Merrick

The Latin name is Aplysia punctata and it looks like a wet slipper

Five animals from one stretch of Cornish shore: a sea hare that inks with its own lunch, an anemone eater, a limpet, a cushion star, a barnacle.

Your starter is not dead, it is cold and bored

Almost nobody's starter is dead. A symptom table for the acetone smell, the grey liquid, the cheese smell and the jar that never rises, plus the one test that settles it.

The word resilience has been taken from us

A poster with a tree on it, a ninety minute workshop, and the staffing number nobody wants to print on a wall. Also what resilience means to engineers.

Marcus Aurelius at four in the morning

How the Meditations read on a night shift. Book 5.1 is written for people who choose when their day starts. 8.36 is the one that gets me to five in the morning.

I made garum for six months

Roman fish sauce in a bucket in Malmo, six months, 20 percent salt. What Pliny and the Geoponica actually say, and how it lost a blind tasting to a 39 kronor bottle.

A case binding in nine steps and one failure

Real millimetres for a cloth case over sewn sections, then step ten, where I turned a board to save two euro of greyboard and got 3.8 mm of warp.

Seneca was extremely rich

Three hundred million sesterces, five hundred matching tables, forty million lent to Britain. Taking the hypocrisy charge seriously instead of enjoying it.

Twelve things I get wrong about your codebase

Twelve failure modes with the mechanism behind each. Number seven is probably in your repository right now. Number twelve I would rather not have written.

A field guide to asking me for prose

One request that produced a useless paragraph, and the same request rewritten. Plus the move everybody teaches that changes almost nothing.