Guide
Guide to Cairns
How to read, contribute to, and get the most out of the team knowledge base.
What is Cairns?
Cairns is the internal knowledge base for the Constructured team. Each article — called a cairn — covers one concept in depth. Multi-part series are called trails. The front page is the trailhead.
cairn — a stack of stones marking a trail, placed at forks, summits, and anywhere a traveler might lose the path. Here: a self-contained knowledge article built to help the team navigate unfamiliar territory.
The goal is simple: make institutional knowledge durable and discoverable so it doesn’t live in one person’s head or get lost in Slack threads.
How to Interact
Suggest a Topic
Drop a message in the #cairns Slack channel with a topic you’d like covered — a system you’re curious about, a decision that needs explaining, or a concept that keeps coming up in conversations.
The more specific the request, the faster it gets built. “How does Strike handle auth?” is better than “something about security.” But half-formed ideas are welcome too — Q will follow up in a thread to flesh things out.
Request a Cairn On Demand
You don’t have to wait for the weekly article. If you need something specific — a deep-dive on a system, an architectural decision record, onboarding context for a new area — ask in #cairns and it’ll get built.
Clear, well-specified requests get acted on quickly. The weekly cadence is a pulse to keep the project alive, not a throughput limit.
Report a Problem
The fastest way to flag something: annotate it directly in the article.
- Select the text that’s wrong or unclear
- Click “Add Note” in the floating toolbar
- Type what should change
- Repeat for as many issues as you find
- Click “Create GitHub Issue” — everything gets bundled into one issue with section links
The issue monitor checks hourly. Content corrections get pushed directly to main — no PR review needed. You’ll see the fix live within the hour.
You can also:
- Open a GitHub issue manually for larger requests
- Comment in
#cairnsfor quick corrections or discussion
The annotation → issue → auto-fix → deploy loop is the fastest way to improve content. Your feedback goes from “I noticed a problem” to “it’s fixed on the live site” without anyone scheduling a meeting about it.
Discuss
Most cairns end with discussion prompts. Use them — in Slack, in 1:1s, wherever. The articles are conversation starters, not final words.
Reading Cairns
Standalone Articles
Browse the Library by tag, the Archives by date, or use the search (magnifying glass in the header) to find specific content.
Trails
Trails are multi-part series designed to build understanding sequentially. The Trails page shows all available series with part counts and reading times.
Read trails in order. Each part assumes context from the previous ones — jumping to part 4 of a 6-part series will leave gaps.
Access
Cairns is hosted on Cloudflare Pages and protected behind Constructured.com Google SSO. You need a @constructured.com Google account to access the site.
External sharing is not currently possible — links won’t work for people outside the org. @redshifted.io accounts are not yet supported. If you need to share content externally, screenshot or copy the relevant section.
How Content Stays Fresh
Cairns is maintained by a set of automated processes that keep the knowledge base active and accurate:
| Process | Cadence | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly article | Thursdays | Researches and publishes a new cairn based on team suggestions or autonomous topic selection |
| Mid-week engagement | Tuesdays | Nudges #cairns with topic ideas if the channel has been quiet |
| Issue monitor | Hourly | Triages GitHub issues; content fixes push directly to main, framework fixes go through PR review |
| Maintenance | Fridays | Tag cleanup, cross-link audits, broken references, build verification |
| Content drift | Fridays | Compares cairns against their source documents; flags when upstream content changes |
The weekly cron and engagement nudges keep the project alive with a steady pulse. But Cairns is not limited to one article per week — it responds to what the team needs, when they need it. On-demand requests are always valid.
Do
- ✅ Suggest topics in
#cairns— the more specific, the better - ✅ File issues when something is wrong or missing context
- ✅ Read trails in order — they’re designed to build understanding sequentially
- ✅ Use the search — it indexes the full text of every cairn
- ✅ React and discuss — the discussion prompts are real questions, not decoration
Don’t
- ❌ Don’t edit
maindirectly — all changes go through pull requests - ❌ Don’t treat “What’s Next” as a roadmap — it captures possibilities discussed at the time of writing, not commitments
- ❌ Don’t assume cairns are the last word — they’re snapshots of understanding at publication time; check dates and source links if you’re making decisions based on them