Writing

Residential proxies killed IP reputation — but they're billed per gigabyte, and that's the crack. Make a client move a large block of unforgeable bytes and you've built a control that costs an honest user seconds and costs an abuser a real invoice, on every attempt. Here's how to enforce it, and everywhere it hurts.

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.

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.

Logbook: tied up at low tide in Comox Harbour.

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.

Code is the what; comments, commit messages, and PR descriptions are the why. Why the LLM era makes writing down context non-negotiable.

Fourteen poems on caretaking, leaving, the lightness after, and the long way back to feeling alive.

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.