Content rules

Voice

Plain language over jargon. Short sentences. One idea each.

No em dashes or en dashes. Anywhere, including inside quotes.

No contractions in professional writing. The site relaxes this where a sentence would otherwise read stiffly; application materials do not.

Sentence case for headings.

The accuracy rule

Never publish an unconfirmed claim. Ask instead.

Every number on this site traces to something checkable. Where a figure is remembered but not verified, it stays off until a source confirms it.

This has teeth. A statistic about mobile traffic was left off a case study because the only record of it was a recollection. It is still off.

No fabricated artifacts

No AI-generated image that imitates a real artifact, ever. Generated art may be decorative and abstract. It may not pretend to be a screen, a document or a piece of work that existed.

A generated image once carried invented magazine cover lines that read as real typography. Reading them closely showed words that were not words. It was not published.

Proprietary work

PayPal work is shown generically. No flows reproduced, no plugin interface, no internal names, no board images. Only merchant names on the cleared list may appear.

Barred phrases

A specific list lives in the repo’s content guide. Each entry is there because it was once wrong, unprovable, or overstated. Some examples: a payments volume acronym, claims that a tool was adopted by a whole team, per-flow timing numbers, and a claim about picking up a framework quickly.

Check the list before writing new copy. It is short, and it is absolute.

Length limits are functional

Several components clip or change layout when copy runs long. The case study card is the strict one: two sentences. Past that, the deck may drop to its fallback list on smaller screens.

Checks before you ship

1. No em dash or en dash.
2. Every number traces to a source you can name.
3. No barred phrase.
4. Card copy is two sentences or fewer.