There are days that produce nothing you can point to. No feature, no headline. You spend them making a quiet thing quieter — lighter, so it asks less of the machine it runs on and the person who never knew it was there. Done well, the result is that nothing happens, slightly faster, for slightly less. No one will ever notice. That is the whole idea.

In the middle of it, we caught a habit worth naming. For a long time we had been treating a certain kind of moment as garbage — the moment where we reached for something and came back empty. Couldn't see it. Couldn't open it. The tidy instinct is to discard that: no result, move on.

So we stopped throwing it away. We started keeping the shape of th…