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.

146 articles

September 11, 2026 A toy Neki router to understand sharded Postgres I built a ~260-line wire-compatible router to see where the shard key saves you, then read PlanetScale's 118M QPS benchmark against it.

postgresdatabasesshardingplanetscalenekitypescript

DIY Linux PhoneSeptember 8, 2026 Omarchy on a OnePlus 6T Booting a spare OnePlus 6T into Arch Linux ARM, Hyprland and Omarchy 4 instead of Android, then making a desktop shell work by finger.

linuxomarchyhyprlandarchandroidhardware

Agent SpendSeptember 7, 2026 Agent Session Logs Already Know What You Spent I summed a month of agent spend straight from local session logs. Per message, per subagent, exact to the cent. No metering needed.

llmtoolingagents

Agent SpendSeptember 6, 2026 How Many Companies Know Their Token Bill? AI cost tracking tools are appearing fast. Metering was never the hard part; knowing which piece of work owns the spend is.

llmtoolingagents

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