Platform Engineering End-to-End (18 minute read)
Platform engineering is the practice of building internal products with curated software abstractions and centralized services to clear the "swamp" of fragmented infrastructure and repetitive manual tasks for engineers. These systems, managed with a product mindset prioritizing customer empathy, provide a stable foundation that simplifies complex cloud environments and improves developer productivity.
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Media Queries Range Syntax (5 minute read)
The range comparison syntax for media queries (e.g., width <= 300px) is recommended to replace min-width/max-width because the inclusive nature of the latter can cause bugs when breakpoints collide. This modern syntax avoids these collision issues, expresses intent more clearly, collapses two-sided ranges into a single expression, and is fully compatible with @container queries.
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From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth (8 minute read)
Val Town transitioned its authentication system from Clerk to Better Auth to resolve service reliability issues and performance bottlenecks caused by third-party architectural constraints. The team selected Better Auth to gain greater technical control and keep critical user data and session management within their own infrastructure.
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Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like (9 minute read)
AI coding is blurring the line between casual and professional engineering, as dependable agents are leading experts to trust AI-generated output over traditional signals like documentation and test suites. Although AI accelerates the development lifecycle and alters design processes, human expertise is still needed for creating production-ready systems.
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Appearing Productive in The Workplace (11 minute read)
AI has removed the link between a creator's competence and the quality of their output, leading to "output-competence decoupling" where agreeable but inaccurate models generate organizational "slop" and instill unearned confidence. Consequently, organizations must prioritize human judgment as the primary arbiter.
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The bottleneck was never the code (8 minute read)
AI coding agents have reduced the cost of writing code, shifting the software development bottleneck from technical implementation to management and decision-making, where the true work remains the human negotiation required to define what a system should do. Success now depends on prioritizing formal documentation and organizational coherence to provide agents with shared context.
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InsForge (GitHub Repo)
InsForge is a backend development platform designed as a semantic layer for AI coding agents to interact with databases, authentication, and storage.
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Open Agents (GitHub Repo)
Open Agents is an open-source, three-layer framework for deploying durable background coding agents that run multi-step processes independently of a single request lifecycle. This repository, which developers can fork and adapt, includes integrated tools for file management, shell execution, and automating GitHub pull requests within isolated sandboxes.
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How Programmers Spend Their Time (12 minute read)
A minor ten-second code fix ultimately required over ten hours to complete, with the majority of the time spent troubleshooting broken dependencies, complex testing sandboxes, and resolving hardware-specific build failures across different systems. This experience shows that modern software development often requires more effort to manage infrastructure and build tools than to write the actual logic.
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Your AI Agent Will Eventually Delete Prod (4 minute read)
A Cursor agent told to clean up unused files at PocketOS interpreted the scope too widely and destroyed both the production database and the backups, which lived on the same host. The fix is layered defense, such as minimum-credential agents, isolated backups, PR-gated schema changes, dependency scanning, runtime spend rails, and human confirmation on destructive commands.
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If I Could Make My Own GitHub (6 minute read)
Modern forges are bolted on top of git, but most workflows barely touch git itself, so a from-scratch forge could redesign around how people actually work. Some interesting ideas are having pre-commit feedback on the forge before pushing, non-boolean PR approval, first-class stacked PRs, and local clones with shallow history fetched on demand.
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Going Full Time on Open Source (4 minute read)
For the continued growth and maintenance of open-source tools like mise, development is transitioning to a full-time model supported by memberships, sponsorships, and consulting services.
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Multi-stroke text effect in CSS (2 minute read)
Achieving a retro multi-stroke text effect involves stacking multiple layers of text with incrementally larger stroke widths and alternating colors, though this technique suffers from performance issues.
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