Feed In Oddities
Once an hour put something through the intake that does not belong; stop after five unknowns handled without widening or closing.
Formerly Grease
TLS GREASE: browsers send meaningless values so servers cannot rust shut.
Seen in David Hall, TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces), Scottish Television, Edinburgh Festival, 1971
Try it on your work
Identify the place where new material enters the thing you're working on. Once an hour, put something through it that does not belong: a wrong size, a wrong kind. Stop when the opening has handled five unknowns without being widened or closed.
Each day, explain your project to someone who has no reason to care, in their terms. Stop after five people. The explanation that survived them is the one that was not built for your usual listeners.
Once a week, route one decision through a person who has never been asked. Stop after a month. If the process could not take it, that is the finding; if it could, the process is now tolerant of strangers.
How it has been used
TLS was designed with extension points, but implementations sometimes became intolerant of values they did not recognise—creating joints that had “rusted shut.” The IETF’s GREASE standard deliberately sends reserved, harmless unknown values through those openings. Systems that wrongly reject them fail early and visibly, before that rigidity becomes widespread enough to block future change.
Where it leads
Grouped under Give me another way in