Writing
CI/CD Optimizations, Part 2: Release Optimization Electric Boogaloo
Three PRs in one evening to speed up a four-platform Tauri release. The median barely moved. The 25- and 30-minute releases went away, and that turned out to be the part worth having.
Why I Built Statio
A lot of what I build comes down to who gets through which door. MCP gave AI agents a master key. Statio is my attempt to give them a badge instead.
CI/CD Optimizations, Part 1: PR Checks
Two cache bugs, one lint flag, and a vulnerability database downloaded forty times a day. Fixing them cut Go jobs by 65% and PR time barely moved. Finding the job that actually set PR time took it from 5.3 minutes to 2.5.
Symbiosisware: Building Software for an Audience of One
Simon Tatham named the software you build only for yourself. AI makes it cheap enough that everyone is about to start building it.
Capsa: Stop Renting Your Documentation
I built an open-source documentation platform because the good managed option wanted ~$5k a year to host what is fundamentally a Markdown renderer. If someone else hosts your docs, you're renting your documentation.
The MCP Token Problem (and Three Ways to Solve It)
Most MCP servers burn 50-80K tokens before the user even asks a question. Why that happens, and the three generation modes I built in mcp-gen to fix it.
Building a Business at 2am
It's 2am. My fiance is asleep, my cat is snoring, and I'm waiting for a release pipeline. Notes on building a business, not a startup, while the house gets framed wall by wall.
Vigil: Producing the Receipts When Your ISP Won't
I built an open-source network reliability monitor because my building gates the ISP, my Slack huddles drop on certain afternoons, and the property manager keeps blaming my modem. I needed evidence.
Pilum: From Launch to Production-Ready in 3 Months
I open-sourced a deployment CLI in December. Then I tried to actually use it to ship 4 products. Here's everything that broke.
Software Engineers Need Reckless Abandonment
After 15 years, I still don't know most things. That's the point. Be bold enough to dive into what you don't know, ask questions at every level, and push for what you believe in.
The Difference Between Good Code and Bad Code Is 5 Minutes
KISS applies to fixing systems too. Spend the extra 5 minutes to make it maintainable, and learn to spot when those 5 minutes are secretly 5 months.
From Demo to Product: Telling the Story of Your Work
Pressing a button speaks a thousand words. Rewrites, migrations, bug fixes: none of it matters if non-technical people can't see why.
How I Start With Any Inherited Codebase
Dropped into an unfamiliar codebase? The process I use to get the lay of the land on any project: Makefiles, architecture docs, and AI tooling.
The Real Economic Threat Is Automation at Scale
The existential threat to labor is physical-world automation, not large language models, and it has very little to do with chatbots.
Big Tech's AI Spending Is Finally Deploying Its Idle Cash
I don't think AI is a bubble. Big tech is finally deploying tens of billions in capital that sat idle for years.
RAG vs NLP vs Raw LLM Calls: A Startup's Guide to Choosing the Right AI Architecture
Startups should probably start with prompts. The honest tradeoffs between RAG, classical NLP, and raw GPT calls, and when each one actually earns its complexity.
Introducing Pilum: A Recipe-Driven Deployment Orchestrator
I built an open-source deployment orchestrator because I had a monorepo with Cloud Run containers, Cloud Functions, Lambda, and a frontend. I didn't want 5 different infra tools.
Building Scalable APIs with Go: A Startup's Guide to Not Overengineering
Unless you're building the next TikTok, scale isn't your problem. The math most startups ignore, when containers beat serverless, and how to avoid architecture astronaut syndrome.
Managing Monorepos at Scale: Lessons from Meta, AWS, and a 15-Repo Migration
What I learned about monorepos from Meta's massive codebase, AWS's polyrepo architecture, and migrating SID from 15 repositories to one.