Bartosz Ciechanowski publishes about once a year, which is exactly how long it takes to build an article where you can grab the physics

The whole internet is arranged to punish this. Publish weekly. Stay top of mind. Feed the algorithm or the algorithm forgets you. Bartosz Ciechanowski publishes roughly once a year, and every single time he does, it goes to the top of Hacker News and gets passed around by people who do not otherwise read about naval architecture.

The articles explain how a thing works: a gear train, a camera lens, GPS, the human ear, an internal combustion engine, the moon. What makes them unlike anything else is that the diagrams are not diagrams. They are simulations, written from scratch, running live in your browser, and you drag them. Rotate the crankshaft and watch the valves time themselves. Move the sun and watch the moon's phase change because of where you put it. You do not read the explanation so much as operate it until it becomes obvious.

Why there are only twenty-two

Here is the arithmetic that makes this remarkable. For one article he has to learn the subject properly, to the level where he can model it. Then write the simulation, which is real engine work: geometry, optics, acoustics, orbital mechanics, whatever the topic demands. Then design the interaction so that grabbing the thing teaches you something. Then write the prose, which is also excellent. Alone. For a year.

Anyone else with that much capability would produce forty posts of a fortieth the depth and be considerably more famous for it. He produces one, and the one is definitive. Twenty-two articles in twelve years is not a small body of work; it is a small number of extremely large objects.

The archive shows the cost honestly. Three articles in 2020, three in 2021, three in 2022, then Bicycle alone in 2023, then Airfoil and Moon in 2024. As the pieces got more ambitious the cadence stretched, because that is what ambition costs when nobody is helping.

The five-year gap

He started in 2014 as an iOS developer, writing sharp technical posts about how NSDictionary works underneath and how to do GPGPU on a phone. Five of those, all good, all the sort of thing a strong engineer writes.

Then nothing, for five years. He came back in 2019 with Colour Spaces, and the whole form was there: interactive, patient, beautiful, aimed at anyone rather than at other iOS developers. The first act taught him to build the machinery the second act runs on. Somebody who has hand-optimised graphics code on a phone is precisely the person who can make a browser render a live optical bench without it stuttering.

It is funded by Patreon, from three dollars a month, which is a rounding error against what this work is worth and exactly the arrangement that lets him take a year. There is no sponsor to satisfy, no cadence to hit, no reason to ship the moon article before the moon article is right. Go and drag something on that site. It is the best argument on the internet for doing one thing slowly.

The coolest explainer on how a mechanical watch works I have ever seen.

Unpolished Watches, on an article about watchmaking written by a software developer