Why I called this site Fool's Cap

At first, this site was almost just my name.

That would have made sense. The domain is my surname. The writing is mine. The projects are mine. If somebody searches for me, I want them to find a real person and not a faceless brand pretending to be larger than it is.

But I also did not want the whole site to feel like a personal brochure.

I wanted it to have a name with a bit of life in it. Something slightly strange. Something people could remember. Something that could hold writing, build logs, experiments, drone photographs, notes from life, and whatever else I end up learning in public.

The first version of the name came from the design process.

While I was working through the design of the website, the fonts, the colours, the paper-like background and the writing-first feel, one of the directions was called Foolscap. It was not yet a personal philosophy. It was the name of a design world: warm, editorial, a little old-fashioned, and built around the idea of writing things down properly.

Then I researched the word.

Foolscap, as one word, has a stranger and better history than I expected. It can mean the fool’s cap itself: the old jester’s hood with peaks and bells. But it also became the name of a writing-paper format. Papermakers used a fool’s cap as a watermark on certain sheets, and over time the mark gave its name to the paper.

That was the part I liked.

The name was not only a joke. It had paper inside it. It had writing inside it. It belonged near notes, drafts, margins, mistakes, and work that is still becoming something. Foolscap was once a common paper format in offices, schools and stationery shops before A4 became the ordinary sheet most of us know now. So even before I made it personal, the word already carried the feeling of a page waiting to be written on.

But the version that stayed with me was not Foolscap.

It was Fool’s Cap.

Two words. Apostrophe. A little less tidy, and much more mine.

Part of that is simple: I love wearing caps. I do not have a huge collection, but I have a few, and I wear them almost every day. Most people who know me probably picture me in a cap before anything else. So when the logo became a little face wearing one, it stopped feeling like a clever name and started feeling like something I could actually stand behind.

The other part is the fool.

I do not mean fool as an insult. I mean it as the honest beginning of everything.

Every person in the world starts as a fool before they know how to do something. You are a fool before you can walk. A fool before you can write. A fool before you can build software, register a company, fly a drone properly, sell something, explain an idea, or recover from the first version of a thing not working.

There is no shame in that. It is the entry fee.

The problem is that as adults we try very hard not to look like beginners. We want to arrive already competent. Already polished. Already certain. But most of the useful things I have learned came from the opposite place: trying something before I fully knew how, paying attention when it broke, and writing down what actually happened.

That is the thread running through this site.

NannyTank started because I was trying to solve a real problem and kept finding more of the shape underneath it. Nodera started because I was looking at small businesses in South Africa and noticing how many enquiries disappear through ordinary gaps. The writing started because I kept learning things that were too specific to leave as private notes.

Fool’s Cap is the name for that posture.

It is not a claim that I know everything. It is almost the opposite. It is a reminder that learning is less embarrassing when you admit where you are starting from. It is a place for evidence, drafts, experiments, wrong turns, small wins, and the occasional note that has nothing to do with work at all.

The logo started on paper, which feels right. A hand-drawn mark for a site about making things by hand before they become systems. A face in a cap, smiling a little, because taking the work seriously does not mean taking yourself too seriously.

So that is the origin.

Fool’s Cap is part old paper reference, part personal habit, and part philosophy.

We are all just fools going through life learning as we go.