Blog

Engineering notes, leadership insights, and hobby experiments.

Heikin Ashi – Part 7: From Failures to Checklists May 25, 2026
Every AI-assisted project session generates failures worth keeping. Almost none of them get kept. The final discipline in the series: extracting what went wrong into artifacts the next session can actually use.
Heikin Ashi – Part 6: When AI Confidence Lies May 22, 2026
AI confidence fails in at least five distinct ways, each with its own recognition signal, its own typical cost, and its own counter-move. A field guide to premise drift, false architectural confidence, speculation as diagnosis, over-generalization from precedent, and confident invention of identifiers.
Heikin Ashi – Part 5: The Operator's Manual May 20, 2026
Debugging a running serverless system is not design chat. A third mode — operational chat — has its own rules: one command per turn, hypotheses labelled as hypotheses, file paths verified not guessed. A taxonomy of where my own deployment sessions broke those rules and why it mattered.
Heikin Ashi – Part 4: From Spec to Production May 17, 2026
Eight hours debugging production-only failures on a system that took thirty hours to design and build. A taxonomy of the boundary defects that CLAUDE.md can state but is structurally unable to prove.
A watchlist sentinel that emails me only when a stock does something interesting May 16, 2026
A serverless daily watchlist watcher that stays silent until a stock forms a meaningful Heikin Ashi pattern — then sends one email with a chart, the numbers, and AI-generated context. The inbox is the interface.
Heikin Ashi – Part 3: The Two Claudes Pattern May 13, 2026
A workflow pattern using two Claude products as distinct roles — chat for architecture and decisions, Claude Code for implementation — with CLAUDE.md as shared memory and a context bundle as the regenerable bridge.
Heikin Ashi – Part 2: Designing by Chat May 11, 2026
A 50-turn design conversation reconstructed as a dialogue with an imaginary critic — on premise drift, false architectural confidence, and why CLAUDE.md is not documentation but executable belief.
Heikin Ashi – Part 1: Designing the Monitoring Service May 10, 2026
A serverless monitoring service for equities — computes Heikin Ashi candles, detects patterns, enriches alerts with AI-generated fundamental context, and sends them by email. Designed entirely in a long chat with Claude.
Terracotta Army – Part 3: Ergonomics and Protocol Apr 26, 2026
Before the first drop of paint, we address the ergonomic gap and define the protocol — four trials pitting 78 specialists against Raphaël 8404 and Winsor & Newton Series 7 controls.
Terracotta Army – Part 2: Mechanics and Behavior Apr 25, 2026
A dive into hair micro-mechanics — how snapback, stroke memory, and capillary flow explain why a 20-cent specialist brush might beat a $30 Kolinsky at its own game.
Terracotta Army – Part 1: The Strategy Apr 24, 2026
A $56 wager on 78 specialist Chinese brushes — testing whether extreme functional decomposition of quality can outperform a few expensive all-rounders in miniature painting.
Circuit Breakers
A pattern that prevents cascading failures in distributed systems by short-circuiting calls to a failing service, letting it recover before traffic is restored.
Web Services & REST
A study guide on REST principles, HTTP semantics, and API design — including four quizzes to test understanding of the core concepts.
Contract Testing
A testing approach that verifies each side of a service integration meets the agreed contract, catching integration bugs without requiring both services to be running together.
Smoke Testing
Notes on smoke testing in regulated environments — fast sanity checks run after a deployment to confirm critical paths still work before deeper verification begins.
System Architecture
Study notes covering system design fundamentals — scalability, reliability, trade-offs, and the vocabulary used in architecture discussions and technical interviews.