New post: Accessible by Design, Not by Retrofit
The accessible build that never got built, why overlays are wrong, and who gets to judge what comes next.
Family · Founder · Builder · Author
Christopher Marr
By day I build - a product studio and a foundation. In the margins I write fiction about the choices that remake us. This is home base for all of it: the two organizations I pour myself into, and the books and essays that come out the other side.
What's new
Recent news
New post: The Whole Pool
Part 3 closes the Time and Tokens series - if code stopped being the qualification, who is actually best placed to build?
New post: Value, Not Hours
Part 2 of the Time and Tokens series - what to charge when the project that took six months now takes two weeks.
What I'm building
A studio and a foundation
For-profit
txp-labs
A product studio building software for real-world problems - from idea to design to launch.
Learn more about txp-labs → Non-profitGairm
Gairm - a calling. A non-profit turning overlooked talent - veterans and people with significant disabilities - into skilled careers.
Learn more about Gairm →Foldpair Saga · 1Forge Lightning
Coming soon · Foldpair Saga
Forge Lightning
Book One of the Foldpair Saga
A sister who calls down lightning, a brother who feels her at the edge of his mind, and a Council that's spent forty years learning to break a foldpair like theirs.
From the desk
Recent writing
Accessible by Design, Not by Retrofit
I don't have a story about watching retrofit accessibility fail; I have one about the accessible thing that never got built. Overlays are wrong, accessibility has to be baked in, and in the time and tokens era building it in should be well within the realm of possible. Today's tools are the floor, and the people who use them every day will judge what comes next.
The Whole Pool: Who Actually Builds Software Now
Part 1 said a capable person who understands the business can now direct AI tools to build working software, and never said which person. The answer has little to do with product versus engineering and almost everything to do with whether you can tell when the machine is lying to you. The gate that used to read 'can you write code' has moved - the mistake now is assuming it disappeared.
Value, Not Hours: Pricing Services When the Work Takes Two Weeks
AI compressed a six-month, two-million-dollar project into two weeks, and every old way of pricing it now screams at somebody. T&M is dead twice over - the escape is outcome-based pricing done with discipline, so you finally get paid for judgment.
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