/Engineering
The slider that did nothing
A retro shader had two signature effects. I dragged its intensity slider from 0 to 100 and nothing on screen moved. Both effects were secretly dead.
// writing
From the workshop
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/EngineeringScaffolding that compiles is not a product
A codebase with real crypto, real schema, and real auth still was not shippable. The gap was the last-mile wiring, and it documented itself.
/EngineeringReport the whole cycle, not just that there is one
Building workman, my agent orchestration tool, meant detecting cycles in a dependency graph. A good error names the loop; a useless one just says one exists.
/EngineeringWebGL contexts are scarce
Two 3D scenes on one page, and the second went blank with Context Lost. I blamed the material. The real limit was the browser itself.
/EngineeringMonorepo tooling will fight you
Three footguns from a multi-package TypeScript monorepo: a rootDir that rejected sibling imports, a shared library that broke everyone at once, and a bundler tracing dead code.
/EngineeringOptional features should fail open
A new AI classifier had no business taking the main pipeline down when the model call failed. So I built it opt-in, fail-open, cached, and gated behind a cheap check.
/EngineeringKeep a living gotchas file
The sharpest bugs compile cleanly and only bite at runtime or in review. A short gotchas file in the repo pays for itself the second time one shows up.
/EngineeringYou can't mock what you new up
A collaborator was built with new inside the service, so no test could reach it. The fix was to move the seam to the edge of my own logic.
/EngineeringMobile is two questions
A pixel-positioned desktop UI was unusable on phones. The fix was not one breakpoint. It was realising mobile is two separate questions.
/CybersecurityA 12-vector AI security hardening plan
Building ContentForge's AI pipeline meant threat-modelling it properly first. Here is the practical, plain-English checklist of twelve places things go wrong, and how to harden each one.