YEARS WEB DEV
20+yrs
ONLINE · OPEN FOR FREELANCE BUILDS// BUILDING IN PUBLIC
$ whoami → captain-randomI BUILDRANDOMTHINGSon purpose,
in public.
Hey — this is Captain Random. I build production software and experiment with how far I can push my imagination into the digital realm, bridging the gap between technology and the problems worth solving. This site is for everyone — here you can see real projects, real workflows, and honest evaluations of the tools I use and build. It's a new project, and it'll grow with every commit. Stick around and watch it take shape.
Live hub
On air & up next
Tue 27 Oct · 07:45 UK
Times in UK
Times in UK
Next stream · tonight
Apex Legends · Gaming
Ranked and chaos nights. Chat calls the drops.
Tue 27 Oct18:00 – 20:00 UK
10:14:12until live
This week live
Mon26GamingToxic Takeover00:30–01:30
Tue27GamingApex Legends18:00–20:00
Wed28GamingApex Legends18:00–20:00
Thu29GamingApex Legends18:00–20:00
Fri30TBCTo be confirmed—
Sat31TBCTo be confirmed—
Sun1TBCTo be confirmed—
Fresh off the build
What's new
Articlepost_today opens two connections. The test fixture only controlled one.Three tests in test_post.py broke when auto_mode was turned back on in production. No code had regressed. pos…25 SeptVideoShadow Boxing — A CJ KataEVA Short24 AugCourseGitHub: the operating system of shippingRun an entire shipping operation on GitHub as a solo developer: repos as the system of record, the gh CLI as…Updated 26 JulPageSecurity by designThe whole philosophy, public: the gate that says no, the 20-doc library, and the proof — this site’s own controls.25 Jul
// WHAT I ACTUALLY SOLVEWhat I build,
What I build,
and what gets solved
when I do.
AGENTIC AI & ARCHITECTURE
Building when code generation is free. How I architect agentic-first systems, what works in practice, what doesn't.
01
RETAIL & HOSPITALITY OPS
23 years in operations and leadership across UK retail and hospitality. Real workflows, real failure points, real software-meets-floor knowledge.
02
AI TOOL EVALS
Honest, practical assessments of the tools I'm experimenting and shipping with. Includes what didn't work.
03
CREATIVE AI
AI music workflows, generative art, and video — for work and for play. Real output, shared as it's made.
04
BUILD IN PUBLIC
Projects from idea to implementation. The process is the point — failures included. Shared live, in public.
05
LEARNING LOG
What I'm currently studying and learning, and whether it was worth the time.
06Recent writing.
TestingPython
#01post_today opens two connections. The test fixture only controlled one.
Three tests in test_post.py broke when auto_mode was turned back on in production. No code had regressed. post_today also opens its own connection to read the auto_mode flag, independent of the connection the fixture supplies, and the test hadn't controlled it.
Read post→
Build LogGodot
#02The proxy proved it; Meshy delivered it — Mixamo was never in the chain
The plan called for Mixamo at step three of five. Instead: Meshy API, Blender retarget, Godot import — two tools, one afternoon, no Mixamo. The proxy rig was why the swap cost nothing.
Read post→
ObservabilitySEO
#03ga-telemetry shipped the same morning as the Phase 1.6 sitemap push — they're the same job
Two pull requests landed on 2026-06-20: a stdlib-only GA skill and an operator-side sitemap push. One queried Google Analytics. The other filed Request-Indexing nudges. Underneath both was the same question — did Google see this? That's one discipline, not two.
Read post→
Build LogUKCalculators
#04`mortgage-abandoned-about-above`: Title-Mangling, Claim Blocks, and the Corrective Pass That Held Fourteen Pillars Together
The Day 2 cron draft came with an unusable slug and three claim blocks that would have shipped unverified. Both got caught and corrected. That pattern — not just the gate, but the corrective pass — is what held a fourteen-pillar streak together.
Read post→
Build LogContent Pipeline
#05The pipeline ran every day in July. Every published article started as a rescue.
Five publish events across July. Every one required a human to notice the cron had failed and pull a piece through by hand. The one exception — a two-day autonomous streak on 16–17 July — proved the pipeline can work. The rescue rate is the metric no one was tracking.
Read post→
Build LogContent Pipeline
#06Zombie draft, dead zone, zero-draft cron: three failure modes from one misread index
Ten cron cycles between 30 June and 13 July produced exactly one ready draft while the skip counter climbed from 2 to 7. Three distinct failure modes were active simultaneously—a zombie IHT draft reaching its third PR, a dead-zone mortgage cluster that never re-drafted, and zero-draft mornings with clean exit codes. The root cause was identical in each case: draft.py could not tell failure from success.
Read post→
AdSenseSEO
#07AdSense re-review submitted: the last fix was deleting content, not adding it
AdSense rejected the UK Calculators site for low-value content on 10 July. The fix over fourteen days was real hub listings, six verified SVG diagrams, and a quality sweep that removed fabricated trust signals — not more pages. Most remediation write-ups budget for additions; this one ends with a deletion sprint.
Read post→
DevOpsBuild Log
#08The GSC and GA crons failed silently for two weeks. That's a telemetry blindspot, not a cron problem.
The nightly GSC and GA telemetry crons for UK Calculators had been dying every night since 20 June. On 4 July a Saturday morning review found the gap — fourteen days of dark data, no alerts, clean-looking logs. The fix took an afternoon. The monitoring lesson took longer.
Read post→
Build LogDesign
#09Branded card names rot. /work's don't any more.
Two corrections arrived within the same hour: one product had rebranded six months earlier, one client project couldn't be named publicly. Both pointed at the same design gap. Closing it required a policy, not a patch.
Read post→
Workshop.
Foundational stack · top 81,722,392 XP · as of 2026-10-27
#1 / 8
TYPESCRIPT
Principal · 3,258 Commits632,238 XP
LVL 79 · 51% to 807,762 XP
#2 / 8
PYTHON
Staff · 1,283 Commits441,878 XP
LVL 66 · 47% to 677,022 XP
#3 / 8
JAVASCRIPT
Senior · 757 Commits223,607 XP
LVL 47 · 28% to 486,793 XP
#4 / 8
SWIFT
Senior · 680 Commits162,344 XP
LVL 40 · 29% to 415,756 XP
#5 / 8
MDX
Senior · 675 Commits118,165 XP
LVL 34 · 37% to 354,335 XP
#6 / 8
PHP
Mid · 301 Commits90,069 XP
LVL 30 · 1% to 316,031 XP
#7 / 8
SHELL
Mid · 148 Commits35,542 XP
LVL 18 · 85% to 19558 XP
#8 / 8
GDSCRIPT
Junior · 14 Commits18,549 XP
LVL 13 · 61% to 141,051 XP
Build log.
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What shipped, what broke, what worked. No marketing. No sponsorships. Sent when there's something worth sending.