The same problems, twenty years apart
Twenty-eight years of work, seven recurring problems, and not one of them runs continuously.
Every thread in this career disappears for at least a decade and comes back. The shortest absence is eleven years. The longest is twenty-four: multi-tenancy, worked on in 1998 and then not again until 2023.
The second surprise is the clustering. Five of the seven threads return inside the same four-year window, after absences of eighteen to twenty-four years. The recent work is where the early work comes back, almost all at once.
The absences
| Thread | Appears | Longest absence |
|---|---|---|
| multi-tenancy | 1998 · 2023 | 24 years |
| the wireframe | 1998 · 2000 · 2023 | 22 |
| R&D labs | 2001 · 2024 | 21 |
| argument as deliverable | 2003 · 2024 | 21 |
| the specification | 2004 · 2005 · 2023 · 2026 | 18 |
| accessibility | 2004 · 2019 | 15 |
| data visualization | 2001 · 2014 | 11 |
How to read it
Black is declared. The bars are one person's account of where he
worked and what the work was about. There is no external register to check
them against, which is the opposite of
the refinery piece, where every figure is federal
data.
Red is derived. The absences are computed from those dates. Nobody
asserted them, and they are the only claim here that follows from the data
rather than from memory. If the declared part is wrong, the red is wrong
with it.
Grey bars are teaching and school, which run alongside the work
rather than instead of it.
What this cannot tell you
- Whether the threads are real or retrofitted
- They were assigned looking backwards. A thread named in 2026 and traced to 1998 is a pattern someone decided was there. The dates are checkable; the categories are a reading.
- Why the gaps happened
- An absence could be a problem going out of fashion, or a career moving away from it, or the same work continuing under a name nobody wrote down. The chart measures silence, not cause.
- Two entries carry no year
- Blade Ventures and Anmahian Winton Architects are in the data and not in the drawing, because an undated bar would have to be placed somewhere and any placement would be invented.