Writing
Long-form engineering notes — on designing software that is pleasant to operate, running Linux in production, and the decisions behind the products I build. Newest first.
Engineering
Most organisations separate the people who build software from the people who run it. I have spent my career doing both. Here is what that taught me about designing systems that survive contact with production.
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Security
AI agents are becoming colleagues with keyboards. After years of managing who can do what on servers, I've applied the same principles to them — least privilege, explicit actors, approvals and honest boundaries — across four tools I build.
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Rust
Building Sysman's desktop app on GPUI, the GPU-accelerated framework behind the Zed editor — why I chose it, the charts I had to write myself, and what it takes to ship a native Linux binary that installs cleanly everywhere.
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Operations
A monitor is most useful at the exact moment the machine dies — which is when most of them lose their data. Designing Sysman's collector around one rule, and what it took to keep that rule.
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Operations
The worst release is the one that stops halfway — a tag pushed, a package published, the documentation still describing last week. Every project I ship uses the same pattern to make that impossible: check everything, ask once, then do it all.
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Linux
Theming a login screen means writing to system directories as root; theming a lock screen means one bug can lock someone out of their own machine. How Darwan handles both — a supervised lock, and a root helper that trusts nothing it is given.
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Product
Every developer eventually writes a content management system. I did it on purpose, after years of installing, patching and rescuing other people's. These are the decisions that made Nibble — and the one I got wrong first.
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Engineering
For most of my career, "which database?" meant "which database server?" Today my default is a file. Here is how to run SQLite in production properly — WAL, backups, honest limits — and when to move on.
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