Articles & Notes
Product engineering, system boundaries, and the tools I ship with.
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Recent writing tagged Engineering.
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2026
17 posts
Small Apps Need Complete Loops
Preparing OneBite and Carfolio in late August made the same lesson visible: a small native app needs a complete everyday loop before it needs more features.
Why x70 Has Two Portals
The x70 client portal and staff Admin share one business lifecycle, but separating their interfaces and authority made the agency system simpler and safer to operate.
Why I Rebuilt Boop v2 Around Inspectable Evidence
Boop v2 expands far beyond data transfer, but the important change is that scores, health signals, Strap controls, and release states expose the evidence behind them.
Two Small Products, Two Hard Boundaries
Agentic UI and GitGrid shipped in the same week. Their useful features are different, but both products became clearer when I defined exactly what they are allowed to change.
What External TestFlight Did Not Prove
Opening Boop to external testers was a real release milestone, but it also clarified the evidence that a build, a review, and a working product each require.
Boop is on External TestFlight
Boop — my local-first WHOOP strap to Apple Health utility — just got external TestFlight approval. Here's what it is, what it isn't, and where to join.
Publishing to LinkedIn Is a State Machine
Building the x70 LinkedIn desk made the remote API call look like the easy part; truthful research, human approval, scheduling, reconnection, and remote publication all need distinct states.
Thirty-Six Browser Tools, One Typed Catalog
x70 Tools launched with 36 local browser utilities, but the part that keeps the collection maintainable is a single typed registry shared by navigation, metadata, routes, and discovery.
A Publish Button Is Not a Release Pipeline
The x70 blog Admin became useful when writing, reviewing, scheduling, Git changes, and deployment evidence stopped being compressed into one optimistic action.
What x70 Social Needed Before It Felt Like a Product
Dashboard polish was not the turning point for x70 Social. The product became coherent when guest access, realtime engagement, developer APIs, and AI moderation each received a precise boundary.
Public Sites and Private Portals Need Opposite Crawler Policies
Applying one SEO checklist to every x70 property would have been wrong: public product pages should be discoverable, while authenticated operational surfaces should make their non-public status explicit.
Why the x70 App Collapsed Onto One Realtime Data Boundary
Moving authentication and application state onto Convex reduced the number of persistence systems in the x70 App, but the real lesson was to migrate boundaries and call sites—not just schemas.
What WWDC26 Changed About the Local-Model Boundary
Apple's 2026 model APIs made local, private-cloud, and third-party inference choices part of one native architecture instead of separate product bets.
Codex on Mobile Is an Approval Surface
Bringing Codex to a phone matters less for writing code than for steering, reviewing, and approving asynchronous work at the right moment.
When a Coding Agent Becomes Infrastructure
Cursor's SDK exposed its agent harness as a programmable service, making the infrastructure around the model the more interesting product boundary.
Every Piece of Case-Study Media Needs a Job
Rebuilding the portfolio’s Work pages taught me that more screenshots do not make a stronger case study; each image, video, and document has to prove a specific part of the story.
Why This Portfolio’s Content Lives With the Code
Moving the portfolio’s editorial content out of a hosted CMS made publishing less magical, but it also made every public claim reviewable, versioned, and easier to keep in sync with the product.