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37 posts on craft.

ADU Builder: a backyard house from the drawing to the last coat

Five small house plans for a Eugene lot, built up one construction stage at a time, with a materials list and a loan estimate.

Jev Odds, Setup Score and Ask: market tools that show their work

Three small apps for odds questions. The chance a stock reaches a price by a date, a setup score with its inputs and backtest on the page, and a just-for-fun page for the silly questions.

Clip Calendar: plan, caption and approve short videos

Small brands plan short videos in spreadsheets and chat threads. Clip Calendar keeps the clip, caption, date and approval together, and it never posts on its own.

Listing Studio: a website for one house

A house for sale usually gets a portal listing and a PDF flyer. Listing Studio gives it a real page, with a 3D model, a daylight study, showings and leads in one place.

Booking Desk: direct booking for five stays near Hayward Field

I rent five stays in Eugene, and four of them share one house. Booking Desk lets returning guests book with me directly, and it never double-books a room.

Trained to listen: where my engineering judgment comes from

The nine posts before this one are about code. This one is about where the judgment underneath them came from: a house of two immigrant engineers, junior tennis, recovery in 2014, a decade of intake, assessment and crisis work, and what all of it does to the way I build.

Shipping a native iOS app as a web studio

Four of my apps are on the App Store, and every one of them compiled long before it shipped. SwiftUI is familiar for about a day, then six things stop working the way CSS taught you. The pipeline that gets a signed build onto somebody else's phone is the part nobody warns you about, including the rejection I could not fix in code.

Video on the web that plays everywhere

A video that plays on every machine you own and shows only a poster on somebody else's older iPad has at least five unrelated causes, and the browser will not tell you which one you have. Here is the ladder I walk, cheapest rung first, and the two-line ffmpeg recipe that settles most of the argument before it starts.

Grace Tarnasky's site, from launch-ready to public

Her palette arrived as a document she had written herself, the headline on the home page is her own sentence, and the fork carried three themes before the quiet one won. Here is what the site is made of, and what ten gated days bought before anybody outside her family could see it.

The tool bench a one-person studio builds for itself

A private bench of ten apps, no accounts, no servers, nobody to support. Here is what is on it, how the slide proofer works out where a platform will crop before the file leaves my hands, and what happened when I ran a slide I had already posted through my own guides.

A booking engine inside the CMS: slots, guards, clocks

Two visitors reach for the same half past ten on a Friday, a second apart. No lock and no unique index can settle it, because the appointment does not live in my database at all. Here is what settles it instead, and the window that stays open behind the answer.

Wireframes that survive contact with the build

Most wireframes get approved and then quietly lose the argument to the browser, because they encoded no constraint the build could not ignore. Here is what mine have to carry: the empty state, the error state, the too-long state, the width the layout really changes at, and a short list of things I refuse to decide.

The fine print on AI video in 2026: what the terms say

I spent a day reading six AI video licences on the vendors' own pages instead of trusting the model cards. One of them forbids commercial use of the output without written permission. One of them excludes the United States from its territory. And the watermark you can switch off is not the one that matters.

A native investing app in Rust that vetoes its own orders

For the first week of this project's life, an account that came back empty read as approved. Every percentage rule in the risk engine was guarded against dividing by zero, and a guard like that carries a second meaning nobody intends. The trading terminal I open-sourced in June is one long argument that a check which cannot run has to answer no.

Color for screens that aren't yours

I ran my own studio palette through the WCAG 2.2 contrast formula as a set instead of one pair at a time, and found two shipping failures, including the link color in every post on this site. The math, the fix in OkLCh that shipped the same morning, the one ground still short, and the tests that catch it next time.

Custom mental health web apps whose answers never leave the device

What a practice gets when it buys one of these is a tool that holds nothing. No row, no account, no export, and therefore no retention schedule to write, no breach plan to rehearse and no deletion request to route through a person three years from now. That is a storage decision, made before any screen is designed, and it decides most of what comes after it. It also has a limit worth being precise about, because the page a tool sits on is a separate question from the tool.

What a therapy practice website should never ask for

The federal definition of individually identifiable health information covers anything a provider receives that relates to a person's mental health or condition and can be tied back to them. Not diagnosis, not treatment: condition. So the website for my own counseling practice never asked for a history, never held a calendar and never took a card. Every other decision on it followed from that one word.

StayEugene: when one house is five bookable listings

StayEugene sells five short-term rentals direct, and four of them are the same building cut at different sizes. That makes availability a question about a set of listings rather than a row in a table, and it is the part of a booking site that a marketplace was quietly doing for you all along.

Which AI video model should a small studio use in 2026

OpenAI removes Sora from its API on 24 September. I re-priced the whole field off vendor rate cards rather than blog posts: what five seconds of video costs on each model, where the arena actually ranks them, and the licence clauses that decide it before the quality does.

World Labs Atlas: what a world model means for AI and physics

World Labs announced Atlas on 1 September 2026, a model trained on 3D Gaussian splats alongside text, images and video. Who built it, what a splat actually is, what the physics benchmarks say, and what a small studio can do with the parts that already ship.

A counselor directory on iOS: what moved to the phone

The boundary between a web directory and its iPhone app is a decision about what deserves to travel. Mine let 589 verified providers cross, in four public JSON files, with the crisis numbers compiled into the binary so they survive with no signal. It left behind the unclaimed license records, the ranking, the accounts, the analytics, and any reason to ask where you are.

Designing without slop: the rules I gave my AI

Every AI design tool lands in the same place: purple gradients, Inter set large, a centered hero over three feature cards. My answer was not to complain about it but to write a law an agent can be held to. Here is that law, with the real values behind it.

One button, no reading, no login: designing panic.btn

There is no account to make, no menu to open and no paragraph to read. Press the one shape on the screen and it becomes a breathing pacer, vibrating on each phase change so the pace can be followed with your eyes shut. This is what that press does, where a counselor's vocabulary shows up in the interface, and where the app stops.

iLovable: a box of therapy tools that stays on the phone

A parts map, a CBT chain, a mood check-in and a day count, in an app that downloads at 13.5 MB and sends nothing to me. The exercises came off paper I handed people in a counseling room for ten years. Most of the design work was deciding what the screen would refuse to do.

What on-device AI costs: a voice journal at 813.4 MB

Mutterly runs on an iPhone XS, a phone from 2018, because its language model rides inside the download. Apple's own on-device model ships almost nothing extra and starts at the iPhone 15 Pro. Five model years of phones sit between those two floors, and that gap is the whole reason for the size.

Twelve neighborhood guides and one valuation form

A market report is accurate and generic; a neighborhood guide is specific and goes stale. Grace Tarnasky's site runs both and joins them with a five-digit number. What each half is for, where the data comes from, what a guide is not allowed to say, and why the valuation form refuses to guess.

The scroll-scrub stack: what actually makes it smooth

A scrubbed film either reads as liquid or as a slideshow being dragged, and I finally measured where the difference lives. It is the encode. One clip, three encodes, sixty seeks each: a median of 3 ms against 15 ms against 32 ms, with the whole frame budget sitting at 16.7. Here is the loop, the encode, the dead zones, and the one line that makes iPhones cooperate.

Mobile-first, one thumb

Mobile first design, as I actually build it: finger-sized targets, Pointer Events instead of mouse events, and nothing important hidden behind a hover. Then the morning my own audit failed a component that was the right size all along, because the test drove a narrow desktop window and called it a phone.

A social composer that exports in the browser

The Ulric Composer designs Instagram posts and reels and renders the finished file in the page: a real PNG off a 2D canvas, a reel recorded frame by frame, no server round trip. How the export works, what WebKit refuses to paint, and the one number the browser and ffmpeg both have to agree on.

Three small iOS apps, and what each of them taught me

Three small iOS apps, one of them 340 times the size of the smallest, and all three declare the same thing on the store: data not collected. The spread between those numbers is the price of keeping a promise on the device, and it is the most useful thing I took out of building them.

Two kids built games, so I gave games a content type

Lulu is 10, Otto is 11, and they are my niece and nephew. Over a handful of afternoons this summer they finished three browser games they wanted to play, and I had to decide where those games would live on my site. Three hand-written pages would have rotted by autumn, so games became a content type instead: a table, a folder scan, and a page that ends with what the game taught the kid who made it.

Procedural geometry vs Blender MCP: where I drew the line

I rebuilt the procedural world demo to settle an argument with myself: draw the geometry in code, or model it in Blender now that an agent can drive Blender over MCP. Four worlds of fences, trees and desks cost 19 to 53 draw calls a frame in code. One running dog cost a 0.91 MB file and three trips back to the prompt.

28,000 listings on one map with MapLibre and no API bill

Every active listing in the state lands on one map, drawn by MapLibre GL JS on ordinary shared hosting, with nothing metering the page loads. One version-stamped GeoJSON off the sync cron feeds the pins, and a self-hosted PMTiles archive is measured and staged to answer for the basemap the free hosted style is drawing today. Measured numbers, the compliance furniture, and the version pin that a release note forced.

When an image pipeline fails silently: a disk-quota postmortem

A listing page said "48 photos" above a grid of blank tiles, and every layer underneath it, from encoder to cache to queue, had reported success. The account had hit its disk quota, the image encoder wrote nothing and said it had worked, and the cache filed the empty result as truth. Here is the whole chain, and the four changes that shipped the same morning.

Building a real estate site for a realtor in The Dalles

Grace Tarnasky messaged me on a Thursday and had a working site on Saturday. A walkthrough and a look at the decisions: why her listings are real pages instead of an IDX iframe, why six neighbourhood guides matter more than a search box, and what a fork of an engine buys you.

Scroll-scrubbed video, the cheapest premium feel on the web

I taught the studio toolchain the Apple-style scroll-scrub technique, then built eight live demos from five-second phone clips to prove it. What makes a scrubbed page feel premium, the plumbing nobody mentions, and where the technique actually earns its keep.

AI slop, and the files that keep it out of my projects

Every AI project drifts toward the same fonts, the same gradients, the same sentences. Mine do not, because every agent I run inherits a small set of law files. Here is the whole playbook, structure and all.

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