Independent engineering research doesn't come with the built-in structure of a university lab or a corporate R&D department. That makes it easy to blur the line between 'researching a question' and 'just building something.' The distinction is worth being explicit about.
It starts with a question, not just a build
Building a working system is engineering practice. Research begins when there's an open question behind the build — whether a particular approach actually works, how well it performs against an alternative, or what its real limits are — and the project is structured to answer that question honestly, including when the answer is 'not yet' or 'not like this.'
Honesty about status is part of the method
Independent research carries a particular obligation: without institutional peer review, the researcher is responsible for being explicit about what's proven, what's in progress, and what's still speculative. That's why the research and projects on this site are labeled by actual status — research, in development, functional system — rather than presented uniformly as finished results.
- State the open question before describing the build
- Separate what's been tested from what's assumed
- Update the stated status as work progresses, rather than leaving it static
- Treat a negative or inconclusive result as a valid research outcome
“A project stops being research the moment its status is overstated to sound more finished than it is.”
