I BUILDRANDOMTHINGSon purpose,
in public.

YEARS WEB DEV

20^yrs

DEVLOG ENTRIES

88^logs

POSTS PUBLISHED

27^articles

RECENT COMMITS

553^/30d

Hi — I'm Captain Random. I build production software, weird little experiments, and document all of it honestly. This site is the public part: real projects, real workflows, real evaluations of the tools I use.

See the work →Read the blog

// WHAT THIS SITE IS ACTUALLY FOR

What I build,
and why I'm still
excited about it.

AGENTIC AI & ARCHITECTURE

Building when code generation is free. How I architect agentic-first systems, what works in practice, what doesn't.

RETAIL & HOSPITALITY OPS

23 years inside UK enterprise retail and hospitality. Real workflows, real failure points, real software-meets-floor knowledge.

AI TOOL EVALS

Honest, practical assessments of Claude Code, Archon, and whatever else I'm shipping with. Includes what didn't work.

CREATIVE AI

Music (Suno workflow), generative art, video. A hobby that produces real output, documented as it goes.

BUILD IN PUBLIC

Projects from idea to implementation. The process is the point — failures included.

LEARNING LOG

What I'm currently studying, how far through it I am, and whether it was worth the time.

Recent writing.

Essays, notes & build logs

Build LogDevOps

#01

2026-06-125 min read

No Composer, no autoloader: the newsletter backend cPanel rewarded

The deployment target was a cPanel shared host with FTP access. Composer wants SSH or a committed vendor directory. Neither fits cleanly on shared hosting. The alternative was require_once, six PHP classes, and a 190-line schema that doubles as documentation. Six sprints in, the backend is completely understood.

One osascript harness, two consumers — how skipping Archon kept the dvlaw stack composable

After the variant-picker shipped, the next call was architectural. Route thesis generation through Archon, or build a project-owned harness and own the primitive. The harness won. What emerged was a two-consumer pattern — thesis generation and voice rewriting off the same base — that Archon would have made awkward.

Scheduling articles through Telegram taught me that cron is the wrong model

The DVLAW pipeline could draft and voice-fix articles but had no scheduling layer. Adding one took six sprints, not because the cron was hard but because scheduling through Telegram needs to capture intent, not timestamps. The grammar parser, the 2×2 keyboard, and the 48-hour grace policy are the same design decision expressed three different ways.

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