Jorge Gonzalez

I have always been captivated by how things work — the kind of thinking that follows questions past the boundaries of any single discipline, arriving sometimes in territory with no map or formal training.

Something I have discovered over the years is that there is a faster, more associative layer of thinking beneath the conscious one — it processes in parallel and surfaces connections before language catches up. Learning to give it room, to slow down enough to listen to it, turns it from a vague feeling into something closer to a working instrument. Along the same lines, a lifelong obsession with design — not as aesthetics but as the study of why things are structured the way they are — has turned out to be unexpectedly transferable. An eye trained to find patterns and structural flaws in one domain starts finding them everywhere else too. The domains change. The question stays the same.

I am a web designer and programmer based in Costa Rica. I build tools, think about systems, and occasionally write long essays about foundational assumptions that turn out to be shakier than advertised. My background is in graphic design. The gap between design and programming turns out to be one of the more productive places to stand.

These are my own explanations for how I think. I hold them loosely — we are all prone to constructing flattering narratives about ourselves, and I am not exempt. But for what it is worth, this is where the work on this site comes from. Not from a curriculum, but from following discomfort until it becomes a pattern, and following the pattern until it becomes a question worth writing down.

I am currently building a text macro browser extension, thinking through a compositional framework for web layouts, and somewhere in the background, working out what geometry looks like when you replace infinite smooth objects with directed steps and rules. The ideas do not always know which category they belong to. That is usually a good sign.