Writing

Technical articles, insights, and lessons learned from building software systems. I write about architecture decisions, engineering practices, and the challenges of delivering reliable software at scale.

142 articles

September 5, 2026 Three Ways to Wire Two Services on AWS A shop and a pharmacy, wired three ways: NAT gateways and IP allowlists, queues between VPCs, IAM identity instead of addresses. Same code, different security.

awsarchitecturesecuritycdkvpcsqsiameventbridgelambda

September 5, 2026 floci: Which Parts of AWS Run Locally for Real I put floci, a LocalStack replacement, through the services a two-VPC design needs. Lambda, ECS, RDS and SQS run. WAF and API Gateway AWS_IAM enforce nothing.

awsflocilocalstackcdktesting

AI Coworkers: Not Just Chatbots or AgentsAugust 31, 2026 Shipping Headlong's Design Doc: The Memory Ladder in ai-coworkers Laude published a progressive-resolution memory design and marked it unimplemented. This is what it looks like shipped in another runtime, and what I refused to take.

llmagentsarchitecturetooling

August 29, 2026 Reverse-Engineering omp.sh's Dithered Background How omp.sh draws its pink dithered planet with a 2D canvas and no WebGL, worked out from the minified bundle and rebuilt as five variations.

procedural-generationjavascriptfrontend

August 28, 2026 Self-hosting a Linear or Jira Replacement: Plane and Huly on 8 GB The two open-source issue trackers worth running in place of Linear or Jira. Huly's own README asks for 8 GB minimum, and the box had 3.6 GB free.

self-hostinglinearjiraproject-managementdockerarm64hetznerinfrastructure

Site BlockerAugust 28, 2026 Simple custom website blocker for Chrome A Chrome extension that blocks sites for eight hours, a day, a week, or permanently, with no way to lift a block early from the popup.

javascripttoolingclaude-code

August 27, 2026 Building with vgpu, Vercel's WebGPU Library I pulled four shader demos out of vgpu's example gallery and shipped them as live sites. One of them took five rounds of debugging to run smoothly.

webgpuwgslvgpuvercel

Token Efficiency: Where the Tokens GoAugust 27, 2026 Comparing graft and jCodeMunch Two MCP servers that index a repo with tree-sitter. I measured both on the same code: 886 tokens of tool schema against 27,526.

llmtoolingmcpclaude-codetoken-efficiencygraftjcodemunch

AI Coworkers: Not Just Chatbots or AgentsAugust 27, 2026 Headlong vs ai-coworkers: What Should an Agent Do When Nothing Is Happening? Laude's Headlong thinks continuously and costs $1-2 an hour at idle. My runtime returns before the model is called. One design question separates them.

llmagentsarchitecturetooling

August 26, 2026 Self-Hosting cal.diy on an arm64 Box The image its README advertises has zero tags. Building it took nine minutes and shipping it would have taken two hours, so the build moved to CI.

self-hostingdockerarm64hetznerinfrastructure