Modernizing an IE-Only Front End With No Tests and 40+ Variants
An IE-only B2B front end, no test suite, and 40+ customer and version variants. Why the safety net for modernizing it turned out to be tooling, not a rewrite.
Read article →Technical Articles
Case studies, deep dives, and lessons learned from building real-world applications.
One Angular App, Two Builds: A VS Code Webview That's Also a PWA
The phone app for my VS Code extension isn't a second UI. It's the same Angular webview, built with a different configuration and one swapped-out bridge.
Read article →
Syncing Todos Through a GitHub Gist: A Three-Way Merge, 149 Tests
Two devices, one gist file, and an API with no conditional writes. How a content-based three-way merge keeps them in sync, and the bugs the tests caught.
Read article →
What 16,000 Installs Taught Me About Maintaining Free Developer Tools
Four VS Code extensions, 16,000+ installs, zero marketing, zero telemetry. The honest economics of maintaining free developer tools, and why it pays off.
Read article →
Signing In to GitHub From a PWA With a 117-Line Cloudflare Worker
GitHub's device-flow endpoints send no CORS headers, so a PWA can't sign in. How a tiny Cloudflare Worker, with two paths and zero secrets, gets around it.
Read article →Claude Code as a Code Reviewer: A Read-Only Subagent and Guard Hooks
How a read-only Claude Code subagent helps review a legacy UI migration, why hooks guard the risky actions, and what I still check by hand in every review.
Read article →
An MCP Server Inside a VS Code Extension: What It Took
AI agents in the editor couldn't see the todos next to them. How a local MCP server inside the extension host fixed it, and what agents need that people don't.
Read article →
Sensitive Candidate Data Without a Database: GDPR on Serverless
NI numbers, bank details, health answers, a photo and a signature. How a small serverless intake pipeline handled GDPR by keeping none of it on the platform.
Read article →
Building a Recruitment Portal Solo in 3 Months: Serverless on a Budget
One developer, three months, a small budget, and sensitive candidate data. The serverless architecture that shipped, including the database I didn't build.
Read article →