Leaving Windows, finding Omarchy, and dressing my OS
A little IDE theme automation hack, growing as a dev, and finding joy in the details.
Writing
Curated essays: field notes, architectural pattern distillations, and honest post-mortems.
2025
September
Why I Like the 12-Factor Agents
A concise, practical take on the 12-Factor Agents and why the constraints matter, what to implement first, and where I'm applying them.
August
Context Engineering: Sculpting Attention Surfaces for Real LLM Work
A practitioner's field guide to moving beyond prompt tinkering—architecting token budgets, retrieval granularity, temporal pruning, and adaptive memory so large language models stay on-mission at scale.
Practical Temporality (Part II): Repairing Time-Aware Semantic Recommendations
Part II of the 3-part series: turns the Part I diagnosis of temporal resistance into a concrete, minimal rollout plan—time decay, hybrid signals, availability filters, safer fallbacks, metrics, and guardrails.
The Ghost's Footprint (Part I): Why Vector Semantics Outlast People
Part I of a 3-part series: a narrative incident report that defines temporal resistance, shows the evidence, and isolates architectural causes before prescribing solutions in Part II.
Semantic Task Matchmaking: Legacy Vector Gravity After 6+ Months Away
Field note and catalyst: why I remained #2 in semantic tags after 6+ months absent, what that reveals about vector gravity, and how it motivated the 'Ghost' series on temporal resistance.
July
Operating Under Drift: a consolidated narrative on process friction
Aggregated themes from multiple posts about review latency, scope churn, incentive signaling, and ownership ambiguity—collected into a single neutral narrative for easier reference.
Origin & Strategy (Canonical)
Compressed early arc: first OSS push, upgradeability stretch, strategic lane targeting, and guiding principles (removes repetition elsewhere).
Reliability & Determinism Playbook
Canonical patterns: deterministic tests, RPC rotation, latency trimming, CI flake prevention.
Type System Patterns
Subtractive TypeScript strategies underpinning webhook enum generation & union simplification.
Delivering the plugin installer after multiple stalled attempts
How I was replaced by two developers, then built the critical partner-facing installer they couldn't ship—while higher rewards went to lower-impact internal tools.
June
Bringing an AI coworker onto GitHub (before everyone else tried)
I rewrote the same plugin across kernel versions just to prove a GitHub thread could think in context—long before 'context engineering' became a buzzword.
Deep in cryptography (and three rewrites that broke momentum)
How I went from payment portal optimization to reverse-engineering libsodium, discovered an easter egg in build output, and learned that technical mastery means nothing when management has no direction.
Sub-second payment portal: fewer RPCs, faster feedback
Consolidate the provider, trim calls, render optimistically, and keep CI honest.
Payment portal UX: mobile guidance, clearer states
Detect non-Web3 mobile, show actionable toasts, fix status messaging, and fetch from the fastest RPC to reduce flicker.
How a trivial config debate exposed deeper process issues
How a simple `packageManager` field in package.json became the hill I died on, and why saying yes to everything while never saying yes to bad ideas is an unwinnable strategy.
May
When TypeScript unions get too big to visualize (and people give up)
Sprawling unions kill maintainability. This approach decomposes, reifies structure, and stops editor crashes (and reviewer fatigue).
A type-level breakthrough that shifted my confidence
Six months in, a stalled complex TypeScript problem became a turning point—applying practiced patterns to contribute a solution and shift my self-perception.
The merge that changed everything (and the three targets I set in my sights)
Fresh off my first successful PR, I tackled UUPS upgradeability for a multi-million dollar protocol. This is the story of building confidence, surviving security audits, and the strategic plan that would make me ubiquitous.
Shipping reliable tests: Cypress + Jest + Foundry
Deterministic tests: select healthy RPCs, stub wallets, mock external APIs, and wire coverage into CI.
My first commit to the internet (and the 15 minutes of terror before hitting push)
The story of my first open source contribution: building an Anvil debugging UI while terrified of peer review, and how one small PR became the foundation of a two-year journey into Web3.
Fail-fast RPC selection for real dApps
Rank endpoints by latency, rotate on error via a provider proxy, and keep types + CI solid.
Hybrid Telegram micro-kernel: architecture vs process drag
Ported a stalled V1 Telegram bot to the V2 kernel with a first-of-its-kind hybrid plugin architecture—and saw process friction dilute momentum.
April
Designing for silence: shaping contributor flow in no-reply repositories
A tiny autoresponder wasn't about automation—it was about defending signal, shaping expectations, and designing contribution paths that feel intentional instead of hostile.
The perfect solution that never shipped (and learning to work with legends)
I built a flawless gasless onboarding system with OpenZeppelin Defender and Cloudflare Workers. It was praised in reviews yet never saw production. This is the story of startup priorities and working with a Clint Eastwood developer.
A PR about architectural taste (and an expensive lesson)
Sometimes the code works, the architecture is sound, and you still get rejected. A $1,500 bounty that slipped away—illustrating the gap between 'correct' and 'mergeable.'
Owning the lane: porting start/stop assignment into something bigger
What began as a simple `/start` and `/stop` port from a legacy bot became a living policy surface—limits, roles, wallet gating, and hard lessons about stewardship, review fatigue, and missed evolution.
Build UbiquityOS plugins fast with a dual-runtime template
Start from a scaffold that already knows Actions vs Workers, has Supabase adapters, and ships with validation and tests.
March
WebAuthn Account Abstraction
A practical approach to account abstraction using WebAuthn passkeys, deterministic EOAs, and Account Kit to make onboarding invisible.