№ 01 · 14 JAN
The release-notes industrial complex, and what we lost.
On the slow disappearance of the engineer's voice from the things she ships, and the marketers who replaced her.
~2,140 words
Long-form pieces about engineering culture, every Tuesday morning. From the desk of Maya Levenson, Issue 01 lands January 14, 2026.
For twelve years I've written things at the edges of other people's products — release notes, internal memos, the speech the CEO gave at the all-hands. Vellum is the first time I'm writing for myself.
It will be a letter about the culture of building software: why we ship the way we do, who pays for our convictions, and what an engineering org owes the people inside it. Some weeks it'll be a story. Some weeks an argument. Once or twice a year, a recipe.
Filed under: engineering culture · the people who do the work · the rooms they do it in.
I.Each issue will be about two thousand words — long enough to make an argument, short enough to read on a train.
II.No paywall. No ads. No "if you liked this, share it" footer. If you liked it, you'll already know what to do.
III.Edited by Ines Calderón, who has spent fifteen years cutting things shorter than I wanted them to be.
IV.The archive will live at vellum.letters — every issue, in order, for as long as I'm writing.
On the slow disappearance of the engineer's voice from the things she ships, and the marketers who replaced her.
A short history of on-call, the math we use to decide it's fair, and the math we use when it isn't.
Three years inside a company I loved and the long week it took to write its obituary in a single Notion doc.
Put down an email. I'll put down the rest.