What we read before we publish a page

Before a property gets a page, it gets a reading list. Not a research plan — an actual pile of things written by people doing the work.

Where it comes from

Forum threads, mostly. The ones from 2019 that still get replies. Vendor documentation, read for what it omits. Podcast episodes where an operator gets specific about a number. Job postings, which describe the real shape of a role better than any article about the role.

None of this is hidden. That is the point. The knowledge to do most jobs is public and has been for years. It is just spread across a hundred sources, each written for a different reader, and none of them says what comes first.

What survives

Most of it does not. A source has to clear two bars. Somebody who did the work has to have written it, and it has to say something specific enough to be wrong.

"Choose a tool that fits your workflow" clears neither. "We ran it for eight months and moved off it when headcount passed forty" clears both.

Then the order

The last step is the one that takes longest. The surviving material gets arranged in the order the work actually happens, which is almost never the order it was written in.

That reordering is most of the value. It is also the part that cannot be automated, which is why we do one trade at a time.