Out of Scope.

A field notebook by Markos P. Merkouris

Anthropologist
working in software.

Current focus

I keep a large corporate group and a small software team understanding each other well enough to build the right things.

How I approach the work

The Forest

Essays and field notes on people, systems, and software.

All field notes

Down with the defaults - on the merits of knobs and dials

Defaults are someone's opinion frozen in place. Why handing stakeholders knobs and dials beats another meeting about a button.

Field note

Finding real solutions is sketching where they aren't

Building a tool in a vacuum produces more solutions, not fewer problems. A story about a shiny system nobody asked for, and why the answers live in the gaps of the context you sketch first.

Field note

Side quests

Experiments, unfinished ideas, and things made for the joy of finding out.

All the detours

Cyprus Historical Atlas

Live

An interactive map of Cyprus through time, linking 16 historical eras with 131 places and 1,145 archaeological finds. Explore the island, its changing political setting and everyday life, then follow the sources behind the story.

Explore the project

Aku

Live

A desktop app that turns any call on my laptop into a transcript with names on it. It transcribes live with a local model or, if I choose, a cloud API, and learns to recognise voices it has heard before.

Explore the project

Shokzer

Live

A small Linux app for my Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 headphones. It changes the EQ, the custom EQ and multipoint from the laptop, settings that used to need the phone app, and checks every change by reading it back from the headset.

Explore the project