drumlin.dev

What is a drumlin

A drumlin is an elongated hill formed underneath a moving glacier. Its long axis records the direction the ice travelled. The ice is gone; the shape it left is the evidence.

They occur in swarms — sometimes thousands together, a landscape geologists call basket-of-eggs topography. The word comes from the Irish droimnín, “little ridge”.

Why this name

This domain was named before anything was built on it, which is the hard case: any name that described the project would be describing a guess, and the guess would quietly become a constraint. The name was chosen against a weighted rubric built from four independent perspectives, with hard gates for spelling ambiguity, cost, trademark collision, and era-dated vocabulary.

Two better-scoring candidates were eliminated late by the trademark gate — both from the ink-and-writing metaphor space, which turns out to be the most heavily colonised neighbourhood in software naming, precisely because that is where language models reach first. Glaciers are further away.

What the name steers is tone, not category: patience, accretion, and a record kept in the shape of the thing rather than in a claim about it.

How this page works

Strata

One layer per day. Thickness is log-scaled from that day's traffic, so a busy day thickens the record without blowing out the page. Colour and texture are seeded deterministically from the date — the same day always looks the same.

Erratics

Visitor notes, lodged in the current layer. In glacial geology an erratic is a boulder carried far from its origin and left somewhere it does not belong.

Marker horizons

Project decisions, laid down as labelled bedding planes.

Colophon

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