Guides
Practical writing on a problem every engineering organization has: decisions get made, reasons get lost. These guides stand on their own - templates, tradeoffs, and honest assessments of what each practice can and can't do - whether or not you ever use Rationale.
What is an Architecture Decision Record (ADR)?What ADRs are, why teams write them, a minimal template you can copy, and where ADRs fall short in practice.Decision log vs ADR vs RFC: which to use whenThree artifacts teams confuse constantly - what each one is for, how they fit together, and what none of them capture.How to document engineering decisionsA lightweight practice that survives contact with real teams - capture the why at the moment of decision, without a process nobody follows.“Why did we decide this?” - recovering lost contextThe decision was made years ago and everyone who made it is gone. A practical playbook for engineering archaeology - and for preventing the next dig.What is organizational memory?Why organizations forget how they think, what explicit and tacit knowledge each cover, and why memory is becoming the durable asset of the AI era.
Why we write these
Rationale builds organizational memory for engineering teams - a Decision Map of what your organization decided, why, and what came next. The practices in these guides are where that problem starts, so we wrote down what we've learned about them.