Blog
Thoughts on software, tools, and building things that work.
Latest Posts
1–12 of 25- 7 min read
Your Clients Know You're Lying About Incident Reports
When your organization calls a misconfiguration an 'attack' or spins a three-month infrastructure failure as a 'security upgrade,' your clients aren't fooled. They're just deciding whether to say something.
- 11 min read
Every Management Failure Is a Retrieval Failure
The information existed. Someone knew. The failure was that knowledge couldn't reach the person who needed it, when they needed it. The fix isn't 'communicate better' — it's building retrieval infrastructure that doesn't depend on humans remembering to use it.
- 5 min read
Latency Kills Curiosity
The same pattern that bounces a visitor from a slow website also erodes curiosity in careers, teams, and minds. Latency isn't just page speed. It's any friction between a person and the thing they're trying to explore.
- 8 min read
The Craftsperson's Tools: Who Owns the AI Governance Docs You Built?
Part of the Cognitive Property series
Your AI governance frameworks encode how you think into portable files. The employer owns the output — but the tools? Where you build them determines who keeps them.
- 8 min read
I Used WordPress for 20 Years and I Was Wrong
After two decades building sites on WordPress — from personal blogs to corporate platforms — I switched to Astro. Here's why the move to static site generation changed everything about how I build for the web.
- 10 min read
Local RAG for Claude Code: Semantic Search Over Your Own Project
Claude Code has session memory and governance documents, but on a project with five hundred markdown files, the gap between what the agent can read at startup and what the project actually knows gets wider every week. pmem is a local RAG memory system that gives Claude Code persistent, semantic search across your project's full history. No external APIs. Setup in two minutes.
- 5 min read
Why Your Page Builder Site Goes White After a Cache Purge
Page builders generate CSS on first render and cache it on disk. When your cache purges, the CSS isn't there yet. The next visitor gets a white page. I built a WordPress plugin to fix the three failure modes that cause it.
- 7 min read
The Discovery Tax
Discovery phases feel expensive. Skipping them is more expensive. Every 'just build it' directive is a bet that you understand the problem completely before starting. That bet almost never pays.
- 5 min read
The Green-Light Problem
The most expensive mistake in platform migrations isn't choosing the wrong platform. It's recommending one before you've validated the assumptions the recommendation depends on. A green light with unresolved checkpoints isn't a recommendation — it's a liability.
- 6 min read
SideMark: Building a Markdown Editor for Two Authors
Every markdown editor assumes one author. When AI agents became co-editors, the 'file changed on disk' dialog became a workflow killer. SideMark is what happens when you solve that problem from the inside.
- 5 min read
Why AI Persona Switching Doesn't Work as Code Review
Asking Claude to 'switch to CEO mode' for a second opinion feels like independent review — but shared context means the reviewer already knows the answers. Here's what actually breaks and what to do instead.
- 6 min read
I Have a Team Now — It Just Happens to Be AI
The progression from 'AI helps me write emails' to 'I manage a department of specialized agents across six domains' happened in eight months. The output scaled. The cognitive load dropped. That combination is new.