Writing
Longer-form essays — on engineering, leadership, and the view from the water. Subscribe via RSS.
- Engineering Field Notes: Writing Down What I'd Otherwise Just Say
Most of what I know about building software lives in my head and in scattered Slack threads. Field Notes are my attempt to write it down once, carefully — numbered, dated, status-tracked notes on the practices I keep reaching for, published openly so I can point at them instead of retyping them.
- Sign the Request, Not the Session: Announcing httpsig
A bearer token is a password you mail to everyone you talk to. HTTP Message Signatures (RFC 9421) sign the request itself instead — provable, per-request, tamper-evident. I built httpsig, a library for it in five languages, and a jwt.io-style playground you can sign and verify in right now, in your browser.
- Comox — Low Water Logbook
Logbook: tied up at low tide in Comox Harbour.
- Let the Machine Draw It: Using AI to Visualize Algorithms
I had a rolling-canary routing algorithm sketched on a whiteboard. Twenty minutes of conversation later I had an interactive emulator I could scrub through. Why building throwaway visualizations is one of the highest-leverage things you can do with an LLM.
- Context Is King: Human Language in Code Matters More Than Ever
Code is the what; comments, commit messages, and PR descriptions are the why. Why the LLM era makes writing down context non-negotiable.
- After the Ledger Collection
Fourteen poems on caretaking, leaving, the lightness after, and the long way back to feeling alive.
- Understanding Navionics Accuracy and Limitations in Marine Navigation
Why "Navionics is inaccurate" usually isn't the app or the charts — it's your GPS source. Reading chart data quality (ZOC) and getting reliable positioning in the Inside Passage.