Every essay and deep dive I have published, aggregated here and from Dev.to.(27 on this site, 12 on Dev.to)
For about four weeks in March and April, Claude Code felt noticeably worse. I was not imagining it. Sessions got repetitive. Tool calls chose weird paths. My usage limits emptied faster than the work I got out of them....
A GitHub repo I starred in January does not run anymore. The tutorial I followed in February has a pinned issue that says "keys getting banned." The Mac mini I was going to buy is still on the wish list, which turns out...
For years I dismissed local-first as a correctness-obsessed ideology. In the last twelve months three of my products adopted it, and the reasons were not what the manifestos said they would be.
I had a $9 Starter tier on one of my tools for eighteen months. Deleting it was the best pricing decision I made last year. Here is the math, the customer impact, and the lesson I am now applying to every other product.
My Auth0 bill last month was $427. For 12,000 monthly active users on a side project that makes roughly $0 in revenue. I spent a Saturday moving off it. This is what happened. The bill Auth0's pricing jumps at the 1,000...
Last month I reviewed a friend's side project. He had 200 paying users, Stripe set up, a working dashboard. The password reset flow sent a reset token in a query string, stored it in plain text in Postgres, and never...
This is part 4. Today: login. Form, server endpoint, session cookie, CSRF, and a real look at timing defense. This is the endpoint attackers probe the most, so it is the one we harden the hardest. The flow +-------+...
This is part 3 of the series on building an auth system from scratch. Today: the register user flow. By the end you will have a working signup page, a server endpoint, a users table, and a verification email getting...
This is day 2 of the series. Yesterday I showed the architecture diagram. Today we are looking at the database that sits underneath it. Every table, every column, every index, and the reason each one exists. If you are...
I am writing this series because I have built authentication from scratch six times, and every time I got it about 80 percent right and discovered the last 20 percent at 2am when a user said something weird happened....
Every product I shipped in year one reimplemented auth. Year two I started extracting it. Year three I built my own service. Here is what that path actually cost, and when you should follow it.
Everyone's chasing foundation models and agent frameworks. The quieter story is a protocol that's becoming the USB-C of AI tooling, and most devs are still sleeping on it.
A cert expired on one of our staging services last month. Nobody noticed for two hours because our monitoring only checked HTTP 200s, and the TLS error happened before HTTP even got involved. The load balancer just...
Every few weeks I need to do something with a certificate. Check when it expires. Look at what SANs are on it. Generate a self-signed one for local dev. Create a CSR. Convert between formats. And every single time, I...
I mass-replaced every classic Unix tool in my dotfiles. It took a few years of stumbling into alternatives, and at some point I realized the list was absurdly long. So I organized it. thegdsks / awesome-modern-cli A...
How I went from bookmarking random GitHub repos to curating a list that hit 150+ stars on day one.
Last week a VS Code extension called specstudio.code-wakatime-activity-tracker was caught dropping a Zig-compiled binary onto developer machines. It looked like WakaTime. It tracked your activity alright, just not in...
I built a six-rule engine that scans my own blog drafts for AI-writing patterns. Three months in, here is what it catches that human editors miss, and why the rules are smaller than you would expect.
How I built a browser-based file toolkit where everything runs client-side. No uploads, no server processing, no data leaves your browser.
Why I built Kavachos, an authentication system designed for the AI-native era with OAuth, MCP auth, and delegation chains.
Why I built a guided breathing app for iOS, and what I learned shipping SwiftUI with HealthKit, CloudKit, and SwiftData.
How Stacklit compresses entire codebases into compact indexes that AI agents can actually use, replacing 400k+ token file dumps.
How I wrapped llama.cpp in a native Swift API with Metal GPU acceleration for on-device LLM inference.
How I built glin-profanity, a fast profanity detection library supporting 24+ languages with context-aware filtering, severity scoring, and MCP server integration.
Hard-won lessons from publishing across three npm scopes: monorepo trade-offs, versioning, CI/CD, MCP servers, and the download numbers that surprised me.
Why I built profClaw, a local-first AI agent engine that runs on Docker, VPS, or your laptop. Architecture decisions, deployment modes, and what I learned about agentic AI.
What GEO is, why it matters for the AI search era, and how I built GeoKit to audit any website's AI-readiness with a 0-100 score.
Why I built theSVG.org, a free library of 5,600+ brand SVGs with variants, an npm ecosystem, and an MCP server for AI assistants.
After shipping fifteen products solo across OSS and SaaS, the advice that looks good on Twitter keeps losing to the unglamorous parts. This is what I actually do, with the tradeoffs named.
Why I built FeaturedDrop, a lightweight library for in-app feature announcements and changelog drops.
The GitHub archive button is underrated. Archiving a dead repo is a gift to future-you, to every potential user who finds it, and to the repo itself. Here is the 60-second ritual I use.
Every product I have shipped in the last two years runs on the same boring stack. That is not a failure of curiosity. That is the point.
How I structure full-stack TypeScript APIs with runtime validation, type inference, and zero duplication between client and server.
Why I rebuilt my portfolio from scratch with Next.js 15, and lessons learned from shipping a modern developer portfolio.
How I went from idea to shipping an AI-powered verdict engine: model selection, prompt engineering, hallucination handling, and the cost lessons that humbled me.
Real-world lessons from migrating a monolith to microservices: the wins, the pain points, and what I'd do differently.
A case study in building a social platform from scratch: the stack choices, real-time trade-offs, moderation pipeline, and what I'd change if I started over.
How building open-source tools at GLINCKER taught me more about software engineering than any job ever could.
What I learned switching between enterprise systems at Ameriprise and building a startup from scratch with GLINCKER.