Writing & build logs.
Essays on software development, web builds, and AI tooling. Plus build notes from what I'm actually working on right now.
The navigation plan shipped on Pagefind. Prerequisite chips were the higher-leverage fix.
Six phases of navigation work shipped on the learning hub in July. Pagefind — site-wide search — closed the programme. Prerequisite chips, one phase earlier, delivered more navigability per line of code by firing at orientation time rather than recovery time.
The read-first chip outperformed the TOC, track sections, and site-wide search
The learning hub navigation programme ran six phases across two days: track sections, a scroll-spy TOC, prerequisite chips, and site-wide Pagefind search. The smallest phase shipped fifth and delivered more navigability than all the rest combined. The structural reason was there in the spec before the build started.
AdSense rejected the site. The ads.txt was fine.
The Google AdSense verdict for UK Calculators arrived 10 July: rejected, “Low value content.” The ads.txt was authorised. The review had nothing to do with technical setup — Google was auditing editorial depth, and the /resources hub pages didn’t pass.
I hand-wrote the newsletter backend in PHP. The threat model is the code.
The captainrandom newsletter subscription backend is 600 lines of PHP, six classes, no framework, no Composer. Every security decision — rate limits, honeypots, time-traps, token hygiene — lives in the endpoint files, readable end-to-end in one sitting. That's the trade: no ecosystem, but a threat model you can hold in your head.
Seven phases in. The chip at the chapter head was still the highest-leverage fix.
The learning hub navigation programme shipped complete last week: seven phases, P0 through P6, from breadcrumb to site-wide Pagefind search. Improving on the earlier post that identified the prerequisite chip as the spec's highest-value navigability fix — having shipped P4's IntersectionObserver scroll-spy and P6's full search index, the designation holds. Here's what shipping the full programme makes visible.