Journal

Writing from the field.

Engineering notes, product launch stories, and lessons from the field — shipped over a decade of building software.

Three map pins side by side — the silhouette the user sees, the rectangular frame MapKit hit-tests, and the offset region Google Maps hit-tests above the bitmap
Engineering 26 min read

Which pin did you tap? Building a test rig that reads the screen, because three map SDKs would not tell us

Tap a pin in a dense pack on iOS and you get its neighbour. On Android you get the one underneath. On the website you get whichever pin's rectangle your finger fell in. We had f...

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A LaCroix electric skateboard shot head-on against black — Hypertrucks splayed wide on pneumatic tyres, a blue anodised hanger, twin LED pods and a carbon deck.
Open-source 24 min read

vesc-workbench — scripting a sealed motor controller, and the dashboard that came out of it

VESC Tool's command line only talks over a cable. Its scripting runtime does not: a script loaded with --loadQml runs inside the application, with the connection object in scope...

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The four rebuilt homepages side by side — Mower Corner's cast-iron and safety-orange shopfront, Breeder's Choice in daylight green, Superior Shavings in industrial iron and red, and AC Service & Parts in bone and forest
Engineering 13 min read

Four Australian client sites, rebuilt for 2026 — and shipped behind a preview on their own live domains

Two sister bedding sites each carried one monolithic Jekyll layout — 1,843 and 1,380 lines — pulling Bootstrap, jQuery and a Font Awesome kit from five CDN hosts before renderin...

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A strip of uptime ticks, one per check run, mostly cyan and broken by a red run of failures bracketed with "OPENED · 35m · RECOVERED"
Open-source 17 min read

clawdwatch — synthetic monitoring for Cloudflare Workers, with an inbox an AI agent can read

The previous version of this monitor alerted once on day one of a multi-day outage and then went quiet while still down, because its state machine had no edge for 'still broken'...

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A red run of failing monitoring ticks feeding into a triage card that names a merged pull request as the cause, with source chips for GitHub, Datadog, Sentry and Rollbar
Open-source 18 min read

thinkbot — the ops agent that reads the 500 nobody was awake for

A health endpoint returned a 500 whose body named the failing dependency, for five hours, while the alert said only "expected 200, got 500". thinkbot is the thing that reads tha...

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Charred logs breaking into orange coals, glowing from within the cracks against a dark background
Open-source 14 min read

Sustain — I was told to play didgeridoo for my snoring, so I built an open-source practice coach

A randomised controlled trial in the BMJ found four months of didgeridoo practice roughly halves sleep apnoea. The catch is the four months: at least 20 minutes a day, five days...

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An architect drafting a technical plan with a pencil and ruler on white paper, seen from above
Open-source 10 min read

linework — drop a 3D model, get a rotatable technical drawing in SVG

I needed exploded, rotatable, annotated drawings for a bike-fitment planner and found that neither three.js nor Zdog does that job. linework is the 171-line core I wrote instead...

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A dimly lit underground mine tunnel receding into darkness, a single lamp glowing in the distance
Open-source 13 min read

durable-sync — offline-first sync for Cloudflare Durable Objects, no Postgres and no container

A finished workout was silently destroyed in production because fetch followed a Cloudflare Access login redirect and reported it as a 200. That bug, and three more like it, are...

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A compass resting on a map — steering a portfolio by a set heading rather than by hand
Open-source 10 min read

Sovereign — an autonomous IBKR fund that trades through bezant, with guardrails because it's real money

One holding had run to 41.6% of my Interactive Brokers account. Sovereign is what I built to trim it on rules: nine single-purpose TypeScript agents on top of bezant, an executo...

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A loaded barbell resting on the floor of a dark gym
Open-source 11 min read

Rampset — I got fired as a customer, so I built the gym app myself and open-sourced it

A sign-in bug, a support ticket, and my grandfathered StrongLifts subscription was cancelled without me asking. The 1,270-workout export became the seed of Rampset: three traini...

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A long-exposure photograph of a river forcing its way through a channel of dark rock — the water never stops moving, finding a path around every obstruction
Engineering 10 min read

Taking over Sequin: adopting an orphaned CDC engine, fixing the Dragonfly crash, and putting it behind Cloudflare Access

A routine Dragonfly redeploy was taking down Sequin, the change-data-capture engine behind CamperMate's search, and upstream had gone into maintenance mode. The crash turned out...

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A small campervan on a rural road at twilight beneath a perfectly conical mountain — the kind of place cell coverage runs out and offline maps start mattering
Engineering 23 min read

Offline maps that look like 2026, not 2013 — a vector→raster MBTiles pipeline

tileserver-gl draws its 256-pixel tiles from the tile one zoom level up. Every archive in the first tier was one level coarser than its filename, 752 tiles in Tasmania were blan...

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A silver iPhone resting on a silver MacBook, hinting at the wireless tether between phone and laptop
Open-source 9 min read

Shutterdrop — wireless tethered phone camera for your Mac

Tap your phone, the photo lands in a folder on your Mac. iOS + Android + a Python receiver over LAN + Bonjour, no cable, no cloud, no account. Three endpoints, a 6-digit pairing...

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Close-up of a dark monitor showing colourful financial line charts trending upward — the kind of data bezant makes typed and programmable
Open-source 10 min read

bezant — typed IBKR access from Rust, HTTP, CLI, MCP, and TypeScript

Interactive Brokers publishes an OpenAPI spec for its 155-path Client Portal API, and no generator will consume it as shipped. bezant normalises it in 13 steps and generates fiv...

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Studio operator checking members in with the SessionHQ platform
Product 9 min read

SessionHQ — a multi-tenant studio check-in platform, live at its first front desk

Our multi-tenant check-in platform is live at Havana on the Hastings — 283 commits, 888 unit tests, the studio's identity enforced from the sign-in token, and the Android and Wo...

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Close-up of a vintage postage stamp collection through a magnifying glass
Open-source 10 min read

Stamp Scanner — iPhone + Mac + SAM 3 for cataloguing stamp collections

The first pipeline ran SAM 2.1 and took 69 seconds to find two stamps on a page. The one that shipped runs SAM 3 with a text prompt, finds 27 in 18 seconds, deduplicates with a ...

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Mountain biker riding a trail through a lush green forest
Open-source 10 min read

bike-part-planner — test-driven MTB part fitment modelling

The question was 'can I fit a coil shock to a 2013 Trek Fuel EX 5 ebike conversion?'. The answer the model produces is that a 184 mm by 50 mm imperial pin-mount shock is not a s...

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Black and white photography studio with lighting gear and seamless backdrop
Open-source 8 min read

Clean Backdrop — free, GPU-accelerated studio backdrop cleanup

The first version healed studio backdrops with the LaMa inpainting model and smudged them. Thirteen commits later the AI is gone and the tool is a shadow lift plus a mask-weight...

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Tax documents and financial paperwork neatly arranged on a desk
Open-source 8 min read

Ledger — Australian personal finance ETL and ATO tax dashboard

A local-first Python tool that turns PDF and CSV statements from eight Australian sources into an ATO-ready tax view — and the parsing bugs that booked every HSBC deposit as spe...

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Abstract neural network illustration representing large language models
Ai 10 min read

local-llm-coding-guide — Qwen, Gemma, and llama.cpp as a coding assistant

A guide to running Qwen and Gemma locally as a coding assistant, built around a benchmark script and a Claude Code harness — because the tok/s number I had published for the 12 ...

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Close-up of a mixing console in a professional recording studio
Open-source 6 min read

audio-analysis-and-recut — reconstructing a live set from the studio master

A 275-line Python and FFmpeg tool that cross-correlates a phone recording of a live set against the studio track, finds the five sections the band actually played, and rebuilds ...

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Android phone displaying app development tools on a desk
Open-source 8 min read

react-native-nitro-unzip — a fast, Nitro-powered unzip module

A React Native ZIP library built on Nitro Modules — about 500 files per second on iOS and 474 on Android on a 350 MB, 10,000-file archive, with progress and cancellation deliver...

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Smartphone screen displaying a folder of social media apps
Open-source 8 min read

claude-social-skills — one CLI for ten platforms, built from their live API specs, checked against their live servers

The first version was three Python plugins that mostly agreed with their own documentation. The rebuild is one command that is generated from what the platforms publish and veri...

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Close-up of an optical camera lens reflecting light
Open-source 8 min read

deflicker-runner — killing LED PWM flicker in 4K video, in 400MB of RAM

A streaming temporal-median deflicker for 4K footage shot under LED lights — five 540p frames in a deque instead of ~18 GB of decoded video, and a 96–211× upscale speedup that m...

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Cinema camera with a large lens in a professional production setting
Open-source 9 min read

color-grade-ai — AI-assisted .cube LUT generation

A Claude Code skill that measures a video frame and fits a .cube 3D LUT to correct it — including the four months its white-balance advice was backwards, and the eleven-defect e...

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The Slack mark beside a terminal window running slackbuzz inbox, slackbuzz reply, and slackbuzz status
Open-source 8 min read

slackbuzz-cli — Slack from the terminal, without leaving flow

A Go CLI for Slack generated from Slack's own OpenAPI spec — 174 typed methods, an app manifest derived from the calls the code makes, and the day files.upload was switched off ...

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The ClickUp mark beside a terminal window running clickup task view, clickup link pr, and clickup status set "review"
Open-source 8 min read

clickup-cli — ClickUp from the terminal, wired into git and GitHub

A Go CLI for ClickUp that reads the task ID off your git branch, links PRs, and keeps a local index because ClickUp's search parameter is silently ignored — warm search 0.49 s a...

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Concert crowd illuminated by stage lights, phones held high
Product 11 min read

Nexxara — event galleries watermarked at request time, in front of R2

Galleries watermarked at request time by a Worker in front of R2 storage, QR-code access, photo grouping with Workers AI, a Durable Object streaming upload progress — and the Im...

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Black screen filled with JavaScript code illuminated in cool light
Open-source 8 min read

cloudflare-worker-rollbar — a Rollbar client built for Workers

A zero-dependency Rollbar client for Cloudflare Workers — fetch only, a handler wrapper that reports after the response has gone, and the circular-reference stack overflow that ...

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Server racks glowing in a modern data centre corridor
Engineering 2 min read

Chrome on Lambda — headful browser in a container image

Chrome with a real screen and real extensions inside an AWS Lambda container image — Xvfb supplies the virtual display Chrome refuses to start without.

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Skater riding a longboard on an asphalt ramp in golden light
Engineering 3 min read

Boosted Board LED brake lights — Arduino, accelerometer, Cylon sweep

An Arduino Uno, an accelerometer and 30 addressable LEDs under a Boosted board — the sweep works, the brake-light threshold is still wrong, and here is why.

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Instructor writing an equation on a whiteboard during a coding dojo
Open-source 2 min read

Elixir Dojo — functional programming, zero local setup

A Dockerised wrapper around Eric Meadows-Jönsson's Elixir workshop — Erlang, Elixir and the test runner live in the container; the editor and the code stay on the laptop.

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Chess pieces arranged on a board — strategic state, one move at a time
Open-source 1 min read

Tic-Tac-Toe Redux Dojo — teaching state management

A Redux coding dojo built around tic-tac-toe — every step is a commit, reducer first, and the time-travel devtools as the payoff.

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