The Fifteenth Standard Philosophy

I’ve always enjoyed building things as a developer, not necessarily for the end-product, but for the experience of building and the insights this gives you into how things work. This often means that I end up building things that already exist, some of which may seem outwardly to be redundant, some of which may have my own unique twist or perspective built into them, but hopefully all of which contain interesting lessons in the journey of how they were built.

Fifteenth Standard is a place for me to share these projects as the products that they are but also as the process that went into building them. Inspired by the XKCD comic Standards, Fifteenth Standard embraces the idea that there have been many versions of these same ideas in the past that we learn from and build on, and that there will be many more in the future that will do the same, but there is still value in trying to build something ourselves.

The projects we build will all be open source, and the challenges and learnings we encounter along the way will all be shared in this blog. Often we will take the scenic route on our way, which might mean that we tend to build our own tools rather than leaning on existing ones. While I hope that our process and codebases will be informative to you, I don’t necessarily advocate for this approach as a best practice in all cases.