domestic: related to the running of a home
engineering: the application of scientific principles to design and build things of value
Welcome to domestic-engineering.com, a blog about applying engineering principles to household management and personal decision-making problems.
This is an unusual personal finance and lifestyle blog in that I make no attempts to tell anyone what to do. Instead of tackling a problem by giving a recommendation, I try to tackle problems by describing the world as accurately as possible. Sometimes that means a bit of math, physics, thermodynamics, physiology, or medicine. Regardless of the topic, my goal is to explain the subject without shying away from relevant technical details. Plenty of other blogs do that, this one does not.
This project began in 2016 as a letter to a friend about the differential equations relevant to loans and investing. Over a few years of discussion, that letter grew into a 90 page manuscript. In June of 2019, I turned that LaTeX book into 30 web articles. The site went live in late June 2019 with the concept that it would cover "household management and personal decision-making problems." Such problems are much broader than personal finance. However, I have tried to limit the topics to those where technical knowledge is relevant and almost universally ignored or severely underappreciated. This criteria is how I ended up writing 10,000 words about sexually transmitted infections on a blog which began as a letter to a friend on personal financial matters.
The site's format is still a work in progress. The content will hopefully continue to be a work in progress for many years to come. I hope you enjoy reading this blog and I hope very much you find the information valuable and understandable.
Consider starting with the introduction article:
2019-06-01 in About
Why we should think carefully about money and engineering
Or if you struggle with reading technical material:
2019-06-24 in About
How to read technical, math heavy, material
And then browse by topic above or check out the most general useful articles:
2019-06-07 in FIRE and investing
Saving time until financial independence has a simple closed-form solution
2019-06-06 in Loans
You do not need calculus to use the loan equations
2019-06-12 in Accounting
The fundamental theory of accounting — money is a conserved quantity
