Index
Dispatches, in reverse order. Some of it useful, some of it a mess — chronicled honestly, not waiting on a tidy story.
The site's coastal bands and the seams between them are a small compositional grammar: a section knows only its own colour, a divider names no neighbour, and adjacency does the storytelling. MDX is the door that lets a post fall straight through it.
There's a new page at /lab/ that lists every custom component on this site — including ones I've taken back out. Here's why a personal site needs a component graveyard and what's in this one.
I surveyed the whole content-management market — open-source monoliths, headless SaaS, enterprise DXPs, site builders — to see where the field actually stands in 2026. The short version: the content layer is being bought, the governance thesis became law, and "open source" needs an audit.
If a federal Drupal shop were going to leave Drupal, what's actually out there? A comparative look at the modern CMS field through the one filter consumer tech ignores, with FedRAMP Marketplace receipts as of July 2026.
A keynote is a company's aspiration; a job posting is its budget. Reading Acquia and Pantheon's hiring side by side reveals where value is moving in content platforms — out of generating and rendering pages, into governance and multi-channel distribution.
Why the new /projects/ page lists fewer things than I have ideas, and what each status label is actually doing.
A photo picked in March, a headline written in October, and a contrast ratio that belongs to nobody. Five overlay techniques, five hostile images, and the build-time brightness math that referees them.
Two résumés are open on my screen and they disagree about who I am — a Drupal specialist or a generalist engineer. Standing on the seam between two careers, and the four values that show up no matter which one I'm pitching.
Everything about AI use is troubling, and I'm a heavy user anyway. On middlemen between two people who could just talk, the echo chamber of one, and the dirty little token junky writing this.
I asked an AI to write this site in my voice and it gave me something polished and dead. So I stopped asking it to be me, and let it wear costumes instead — an experiment in reader-chosen voice.
Prioritization isn't ranking — it's deciding, out loud, what you're willing to give up. On liturgical calendars, the backlog as a promise, and the small funerals hidden in every daily plan.
A senior-engineer coding challenge, built three ways — me over two careful days, then two Claude models on the same brief in an hour and in twenty-three minutes. All three are playable here.
Every post page now ships a small block of structured data describing itself. Here's what's in it, why it matters, and the one line that prevents it from blowing up the page.
Every post now has a 1200×630 share card generated at build time from its title, description, and date. Here's how it works and the one small fight that paused it for a few hours.
Self-linking headings, footnotes via GFM, and a deliberate non-feature — external links that don't hijack your tab or wear a little arrow. Standard rehype/remark plugins, plus an opinion about respecting the reader.
Under each post there's now a small "Related writing" section with up to three other posts. It's tag-based, ranked by overlap, and renders nothing when there's no honest match — which on day one means it renders nothing at all.
A small taxonomy that earns its keep at scale. Every post can now declare an array of tags; the tag chips appear on cards and post headers; a per-tag page lists everything under each one; the tags index sizes tag names by how many posts they hold.
Why this site now has a draft state for posts, and how it stays out of production without any plumbing I'll forget to maintain.
Four weeks into a layoff that doesn't quite feel like one — daily structure, side projects, and the surprise of unstructured time.
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