Notes from building
small things properly.

Six write-ups on the decisions that were not obvious: where to run the work, how to model rules as data, how a one-line event pattern cost eleven requests a second, how to price for someone who has never bought software, how a week actually divides, and what I refuse.

6 notesupdated 10 Nov 2026no newsletter

01

Your image never leaves the device

Why I moved image processing into the browser — bandwidth math, verifiable privacy, and where it breaks.

Ten passport specs, one table

Regulatory rules are data, not screens. The crop arithmetic most tools get wrong.

Eighteen requests a second

A state broadcast that became an infinite loop, and the four-line fix.

Quoting people who have never bought software

They compare your price to doing nothing. Three quote shapes and a one-page format.

One person, four projects

Only 18 of 40 hours are buildable. The capacity math nobody does before saying yes.

The projects I turn down

Six kinds of work I refuse, and the sentence I use each time.