The Saddest Thing I Have Ever Read
Reading "Everything is Tuberculosis" by John Green opened my eyes to a part of the world I had long thought was extinct.
If it's Chanove, it works
Chanove Works
Ideas, tools, and experiments built to work.
A home for essays, projects, guides, recommendations, and future products — exploring engineering, learning, culture, money, and the process of building useful things.
- Essays
- Projects
- Guides
- Recommendations
- Tools
Start here
Four ways in
Chanove Works is one project with several rooms. Here is what each holds.
01
The Chanove Log
Essays, poems, notes, reviews, and reflections from Roland Chanove and selected contributors.
Read the Log 02Lab
Projects, experiments, research notes, tools, simulations, prototypes, and build logs.
Explore the Lab 03Guides
Practical resources, templates, courses, calculators, and products built from real experience.
View Guides 04Tools
Web-based tools built to answer one real question well — calculators, planners, trackers, and utilities from Chanove Works.
Explore Tools The heart of the site
View all posts
The Chanove Log
A record of what we are learning, building, questioning, and refining.
Essays and poems. Engineering notes and research. Thoughts on books and films. Money, culture, and life. Reflections, and writing from invited guests. One archive, kept honestly over time.
Build Things That Work
A working thing is an argument you can't talk your way out of. It either holds or it doesn't — and that honesty is the whole point of making.
Notes on Margins
A safety factor isn't a confession of ignorance. It's a deliberate purchase of room — and knowing what you're buying changes how you spend.
The Lab
Explore the Lab Projects in progress
Projects, experiments, software tools, engineering work, research notes, and technical explorations from Chanove Works.
Live
Corpra
A focused tool for training, nutrition, and recovery — built to answer real questions about progress instead of piling up numbers. The first tool to live "by Chanove Works."
In progress
Build Logs
Long-form records of projects as they happen — decisions, dead ends, and the fixes that worked. Less a portfolio, more a paper trail of how things actually got made.
Guides, tools & products
Built from real experience
Practical resources — templates, guides, courses, calculators, and future products. This section is built to grow.
Templates & checklists
Reusable starting points distilled from doing the work — project setups, review checklists, and frameworks that survived contact with reality.
Coming soonCourses
Structured, self-paced walk-throughs of subjects worth learning carefully. Fewer, deeper, and built to leave you genuinely more capable.
Coming soonGuides
Plain, practical write-ups that take you from a real starting point to a real result, with the dead ends already removed.
Coming soon Recommendations
Browse all
A curated library
Books, films, tools, software, courses, gear, and resources worth studying — chosen carefully, not collected.
Books
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb — Richard Rhodes A physics epic that treats genius as sustained attention. History, science, and consequence held together honestly.
- Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down — J.E. Gordon The clearest intuition for why materials behave as they do. Engineering written like good conversation.
Films
- The Right Stuff — Philip Kaufman On competence, nerve, and the unglamorous discipline behind things that look heroic from the outside.
- Whiplash — Damien Chazelle A hard, useful argument with itself about the cost of mastery. Sits with you afterward.
Courses
- MIT OpenCourseWare — Classical Mechanics (8.01) The foundation, taught without shortcuts. Free, and still better than most paid alternatives.
- 3Blue1Brown — Essence of Linear Algebra Builds the picture behind the procedures. Watch before, during, and after a real course.
The mission
Built to Think, Learn, and Make
Chanove Works begins as a writing and project space, but is built to grow into a company for ideas, tools, education, and products. It is a place to think clearly, build carefully, and make useful things.
- 01
Think clearly
Plain language, honest reasoning, and a willingness to say what is actually true.
- 02
Respect craft
The details are the work. Finish things, and finish them properly.
- 03
Learn in public
Write down what is being figured out — including the parts still unfinished.
- 04
Build things that work
The standard is simple: does it hold up when it meets a real problem?