About these notes

Every team accumulates knowledge the hard way: a postmortem here, a migration there, a design review where someone finally said the thing out loud. Most of it evaporates. Field Notes is our refusal to let it.

These are working notes from Prosyon — short, honest write-ups of what we learned building and operating real systems. Not tutorials, not thought leadership. Just observations, recorded close to where they happened, while they were still sharp.

Why a constellation

A single observation is easy to dismiss. But when you read enough of them together, patterns emerge — trade-offs that keep recurring, designs that held up under load, mistakes that could have been avoided with a different starting assumption. Individual notes are the data points; the patterns between them are the insight.

The visual theme is a nod to that idea: each note is one star, and the connections worth drawing are the constellation.

The name

The journal is named after Procyon (Alpha Canis Minoris), the eighth-brightest star in the night sky. It’s a bright, steady reference point — the standard we aim for with these notes.

How we write them

• Close to the work. A note is written while the lesson is still warm, not reconstructed months later.
• Specific over general. Concrete decisions, real trade-offs, named constraints. We’d rather be precise and wrong than vague and safe.
• Durable. We optimise for the version of us reading this in two years, not for engagement this week.

If something here changes how you build, the note did its job. Find us at mail.procyon.ca.