The library
Writing
Essays, field notes, and practical series about engineering leadership and the systems behind the work.
Series
Longer arcs that develop one problem across several parts, ordered from premise to practice.
Three Machines, One Flake
A migration from chezmoi to Nix across a laptop and home server—and the public VPS that proved the right answer is sometimes not Nix.
Open series →
Building dam.rs
Technical field notes from building dam.rs: storage economics, searchable archives, tenant-safe delivery, customer-owned infrastructure, integrity scrubbing, and accessible browsing at scale.
Open series →
Building the Kindle I Wanted
Jailbreaking a Paperwhite, extending KOReader, and connecting it to a private reading stack.
Open series →
Production Observability at System Boundaries
Field notes on proving telemetry across proxies, runtimes, queues, edge controls, and production logs without confusing configuration with evidence.
Open series →
Mobile Release Engineering
Field-tested release engineering across iOS, Android, and macOS: promotion gates, build economics, signing custody, immutable artifacts, and user-installable proof.
Open series →
Building a Slack Engineering Agent
How a multi-tenant Slack agent turns an @-mention into a pull request: the end-to-end path, the Postgres-backed task queue, the single policy gate that keeps an autonomous agent safe, and the ports-and-adapters spine that holds it together.
Open series →
A Home for AI Artifacts
The internal platform where the team publishes AI-generated artifacts to durable, authenticated URLs instead of external services: what it does, how it's built on one small box, and the serverless start we walked back.
Open series →
A spare MacBook as a home server
How I turned a spare MacBook into the most useful infrastructure I own: how I reach it with no public address, the background jobs that run my week, the media stack and what I deleted, one dashboard that makes it usable, and the local model, monitoring, and backups that let me trust it.
Open series →
Building a school-assignment assistant for my daughter
Building a private school-assignment assistant for one child: scraping a portal with no API, an LLM that learns to discard, cached summaries, a small agent, and knowing what it costs.
Open series →
Building Press
How I built Press, the editorial engine that writes from my work. One boundary of the system per part.
Open series →Forward Deployed Engineering
Field reports from the boundary between software, operations, and the people using both.
Forward Deployed Engineering
A field-engineering series about customer-embedded discovery, production rollout, access, knowledge transfer, and the product feedback loops that turn one deployment into reusable leverage.
Agent Notes
Operating notes and reusable team practices from real work with coding agents.
Agent Notes
Evidence-backed notes on verification, handoffs, boundaries, and the habits that make agent work dependable.
All writing
The complete chronological archive, including every series part and standalone note.
Notes from Skippednote
New posts, occasionally.
Essays and field notes about engineering leadership, infrastructure, software, books, and the systems I build for myself.