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17 posts on engineering.

The old browser you forgot to test

One word on line 18 of my stylesheet decides whether the header stays pinned on an iPhone. The iOS Safari position fixed bug, the feature query that gates the fix honestly, and the measurement that found a rule on my own index assuming a browser twenty-six Chrome versions newer than my written floor, which I fixed the same day.

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.

The loading experience is the product

A scrub film on my products page is 8,310,726 bytes. Its poster frame is 42,046 bytes, and the poster is the only one of the two most visitors ever see. What the research on skeletons and spinners actually says, what the Core Web Vitals actually measure, and the layout shift my own reveal animation was covering for.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What a licensed psilocybin practice needs from its site

A regulated practice cannot buy a single click, so organic search has to carry everything. Here is what that changed: an age gate that keeps the page crawlable, booking built into the CMS with the acknowledgments recorded, mail that sends through one provider and receives through another, and a review card I shipped and then switched off for good.

One engine, three client sites: the fork per client model

Three live sites share one CMS engine and share nothing at runtime: separate repositories, separate keys, separate databases, separate hosting accounts. The bill for that isolation arrives every time I fix something in the engine, because a fix lands in one copy and has to be carried to the rest. Here is the ritual, the path a real security fix took, and the four ways the sweep has quietly failed on me.

What $99 a month buys a clinical practice

Two tiers on a page nobody has to call about: Foundation at $99 a month, Foundation plus Local at $199, setup $500 once. What each one includes, why the Stripe hand-off happens after the intake instead of from a buy button, and the three rules that decide how a therapy practice site gets built.

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.

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.

Graph RAG vs vector RAG: when the graph earns its keep

Vector retrieval answers the question of what resembles this text, while a graph answers what is connected to it, and the two fail on different questions. The benchmarks say the difference is large on relational questions and close to nothing on lookups, which makes this an accounting decision rather than an architecture debate. What each one costs, the hybrid I actually run, and how to decide before you buy an index.

The questions similarity search can't answer

The assistant on this site can find anything that resembles your question. It cannot yet follow a chain of facts spread across three notes. Why that failure is structural, what a knowledge graph actually is, and how I plan to wire one into the studio's retrieval without tearing out what works.

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