Taste is the last gate.

Most decisions in software have no right answer in the data. Two designs test the same. Two architectures both work. Two directions both look sensible on paper. Somebody still has to choose.

What they choose with is taste, and people tend to talk about it as if it were decoration.

Where it comes from.

Taste is judgement that has been trained for a long time. You build things, you see what held up and what didn’t, and eventually you can tell something is off before you can say why. The reason usually arrives six months later.

You can’t get it from a book, and it can’t be handed over in a meeting. It comes from shipping, paying attention and being wrong often enough to notice.

How we use it.

Taste is the last gate before anything goes out. A line of code, a sentence on a page, the radius of a button, the name of a product. Something can pass the brief, the tests and the spec and still be wrong. When that happens, we make it again.

That’s slow. It’s also why the things we make don’t look as if a committee made them.