Going European, one provider at a time
Why I have been moving my personal projects to European infrastructure: openSUSE on the desktop, Bunny.net for media, and GERTY moving from Vultr to Hetzner. The domain is the last one left.
blog
Writing about software, systems I build, and the work behind them.
Sooo... am I infected?
A new preprint models LLM adoption like an epidemic. What it actually says about tipping points, dependence, and how to stay the healthy kind of user.
Back on Firefox, for now
Vivaldi let go of uBlock Origin, Google keeps deciding what ad blockers may do, and I am back on Firefox for personal browsing.
Four out of five, and the language still matters
Sebastian Bergmann scores PHP in 2026 against a modern language checklist. A note on why I keep hunkering into PHP, and why "languages don't matter now" does not survive a paid job.
Breaking Evil
Walter White explains the strategy in one line in season two. Google has been running it on Android for fifteen years, and this September it starts collecting.
Serving the fediverse from memory
A page that shows my fediverse posts, why it is filtered the way it is, and the rebuild that took it from a browser fetching my server on every visit to an archive held in memory.
LagomCMS, part 4: what building it corrected
Every place the LagomCMS spec turned out wrong once I built it, what it looks like in production on this site, and the two lessons.
The horrors persist, but so do we
More applicants, fewer humans reading them, and an AI screen that trims on the criteria that matter least. What the developer job market looks like from inside it in 2026.
LagomCMS, part 3: the design
Six requirements, why OpenResty and LuaJIT, what I borrowed from Kirby, Sanity, Payload, WordPress and Neovim, where those ideas collided, and every decision I locked before writing code.
"AI" - A Retrospective, Part III: Where the Leverage Is Now
The practical end of the series: the productivity gains that are real, the traps that remain, and how serious developers should use LLMs now.
State of WordPress 2026
PHP-native blocks in 7.0, a talent pipeline that is quietly drying up, and what it actually takes to run WordPress at scale in 2026.
I Want to Get Off Mr. LinkedIn's Wild Ride
LinkedIn is still where software work happens, which is the part that hurts. A short essay on the panopticon logic of professional networking, why nobody has replaced it, and the people who have at least tried.
"AI" - A Retrospective, Part II: The Confidence Game
The models are useful. The marketing around them is not honest. This is the part about confident wrongness, fear-driven hype, captured voices, and the surveillance bargain behind mass-market LLMs.
"AI" - A Retrospective, Part I: Genealogy
A working genealogy of the consumer LLM wave: the releases that hit the scene, how they were received, and what I actually used them for.
Model Context Protocol
What MCP is, where I used it, where it bites, and the rule I ended up with.
State of the Browsers in 2026
I wanted to stay a Firefox person. The web kept punishing me for it, and eventually I stopped pretending I was holding the line.
Replacing Spotify
After a decade of streaming, I bought a DAP and started syncing FLACs from my own library.
LagomCMS, part 2: what the last generation got right and wrong
Static site generators, flat-file CMSes, headless APIs, WordPress plugins and what actually makes a CMS slow: what I took from each into LagomCMS.
200,000 Hours of Your Life
A personal note on ergonomics, split keyboards, and the slow physical cost of a life spent at computers.
Cognitive Load Theory
Your brain is a battery. Plan accordingly.
LagomCMS, part 1: what a CMS actually has to do
Before building LagomCMS I went back to where CMSes came from. The four parts every CMS needs, and the trade-off behind each one.
PHP in 2024
PHP grew up quietly while the JavaScript ecosystem kept tearing itself apart. The language and its tooling are genuinely good now, and Laravel is the proof.
The Case for a Commonplace Notebook
The one thing a Markdown vault cannot do for you, and the analog tool that handles it.
Structured Notes for Developers
Habit trackers own the record and throw away the history. Daily Markdown notes, Obsidian, and a custom plugin that turns the day into data you still own.