Code Blocks is a tiny software studio based in Waterloo, building apps for friends of friends.

We begin with a question that sounds simple and is not. What should this feel like? Not what it should do, or how quickly it could be made, but how it should sit with someone at the end of a long day. Everything that follows is an answer to that.

There is a moment, quite late on, when a thing stops being a collection of decisions and becomes simply itself. Most software never reaches it. It works, and it is released, and it remains a collection of decisions.

So we care enormously about the parts nobody will ever name. The weight of a gesture. The pause before something answers. A surface that gives exactly as much as you expected it to. These are not details applied at the end. They are the object.

Simplicity is not what is left over when things are removed. It is what remains when a problem is understood so completely that only one honest answer is possible. That understanding is slow, and we have never found a way to hurry it.

We are small, deliberately. The person who draws a thing is the person who makes it. Nothing is described, handed across a gap and hoped for.

And so we take on very little, and we stay with it far longer than is reasonable. The last small part of making something is the part people feel, and it is almost always the part that is given away.