Writing.

How I run my day-to-day development across dedicated virtual machines on a single OVH bare-metal server, connecting from thin clients with remote mobile simulators and multi-model agent workflows.

Benchmarking small language models to run on a phone: why accuracy plateaus at 3-4B, why RAG hurt, and how a deterministic calculator beat the LLM.

How Gratin’s original local-first recipe app was built: one React core, desktop and mobile shells, and encrypted sync. Updated for its optional AI connector.

Rewriting a slow, paid ANTLR SQL parser in two days, 3-20x faster on real customer SQL, using a Ralph Wiggum loop and a corpus of production queries.

A year migrating a frontend off Firestore with dual writes, feature-flagged reads, and SSE for real-time, plus where the abstraction boundary should live.

Fixing a slow React app: why memoization is a bandaid, how Redux selectors and a whole workspace in memory caused it, and what actually worked.

Greenkeeper is a local Go daemon that watches your GitHub PRs and runs your AI CLI in a git worktree when CI fails, conflicts appear, or reviews stall.

An archived React dashboard comparing Cursor models on price, cache economics, Arena scores, and speed. Retired in October 2026.

Inspect clipboard formats your browser exposes, edit supported content, and copy it back with rich previews. Read and write support varies by browser.

The registry pattern: a typed lookup table of handlers behind one interface for notifications and AI tool calls, and why it isn't the service locator.

Peer-to-peer all-hands Q&A with questions kept in browser memory and an optional local AI suggestion that you review and accept before sending.

Applying controller-service-repository thinking to React: view models, state management as a data-access layer, and why feature isolation is a lie.

Ship AI-generated code without regret by hiding it behind interfaces: contracts, dependency injection, and why the old Java patterns were right all along.

Local-first vs offline-first vs cloud: who owns your data, why Evolu and CRDTs make local-first practical, and the Paprika problem waiting to strand you.

Typed error handling in TypeScript with neverthrow: three ways to structure errors across layers, a namespace pattern, and exhaustive switch safety.

Controllers, services, and repositories in TypeScript: hexagonal architecture, why I use classes over functions, and the late-binding trap to avoid.

How I run one monorepo for every side project: shared Pulumi infra, a 15-line SPA deploy, why I avoid Vercel, and why I keep coming back to AWS.

An archived Spotify Wrapped-style dashboard for Cursor usage, built in a weekend with AI. Retired in October 2026.

A Secret Santa organiser with exclusion constraints and shareable links, now using a Cloudflare Worker and KV for new games.

An archived Spotify playlist cover generator with constrained randomness, retired in October 2026.

Losing 50TB to a RaidZ1 mistake, rebuilding on RaidZ2, and expanding to two nodes: hard-won homelab lessons in ZFS redundancy and failure modes.

Running TerribleHack 2025 solo for the first time: print disasters, 17 gloriously terrible projects, and a denim trophy the winners tear apart.

Flying to ETHGlobal NYC after winning Web3NZ: building HouseHodl, a trustless shared-expenses app, why cross-chain broke, and napping on the venue floor.

How a team of Web3 first-timers built LoanMarket in 18 hours, sharing one KYC verification across lenders with verifiable credentials, and won best overall.

Co-organising TerribleHack 2024 as Zac hands over the reins: destroy-your-project challenges, ice-cutlery dinners, and what makes a great maker event.

Designing Rent Racket, a political landlord-satire card game, at Kiwijam '24: fast paper prototyping, tuning the rules, and laser-cutting the final set.

Building the software behind Fathomiser's water-tank monitoring: decoding device time, estimating volume, displaying history, and handling alerts.

Migrating a homelab from Unraid and Docker to TrueNAS Scale and Kubernetes: multiple storage classes, ZFS redundancy, GPU passthrough, and K3s in nspawn.

My platform work at MATTR: eventing libraries, code generation with ts-morph and string templates, Protobuf contracts, Kafka costs, and the engineering decisions around them.

Building a crowd-controlled robotic bartender at TerribleHack 2023: peristaltic pumps, a WebSocket god-client deploy pattern, and a force-push disaster.

Building InfraNZ at GovHack 2023: a 3D GIS map of Auckland's hidden public infrastructure with DeckGL, council open data, and a Rust outage API.

Bustle, a GovHack 2022 concept: a loyalty and gamification layer for Auckland public transport, mapping congestion and carbon with open transit data.

Turning a 3D printer into a CNC tattoo machine at the first Terrible Ideas Hackathon: G-code, arm-probing failures, and spring-loading a tattoo gun.

A Spidertracks contract extending React and Redux, moving core JavaScript to TypeScript, and building Node.js endpoints to replace Spring services.

Customer onboarding at Fisher Funds: Gatsby and TypeScript forms, MuleSoft and Salesforce integration, junior mentorship, and the case for observability.

Karere at Kete Kai: AWS SNS as the message broker, serverless saga choreography, local error compensation, and WebSocket updates, compared with today's Cloudflare Workflows.

React, TypeScript, and TradingView UI work at Laminar, connecting a real-time cryptocurrency trading frontend to Node.js, uWebSockets, MongoDB, and Ethereum services.

Building an iBeacon-based alternate-reality game at Shwoop with React Native, TypeScript, and a serverless AWS REST API.