Articles
Observations from 35 years of building, breaking and fixing systems. Architecture, security, AI and the decisions that connect them.
Why Shell, Regex and ASN.1 Are Suddenly Sexy Again
Some technologies never died – they were merely displaced. AI is now democratising complex tools and rehabilitating the formal. On the quiet renaissance of robust architectures.
Read article →When the Vibes End, the Thinking Begins
Vibe Coding flatters an era that believes complexity can be replaced by intuition. But a system is not born the moment something runs on screen. An essay on the difference between producing and understanding.
Read article →AI Is Splitting the Engineers – and the Answer Is Architecture
The split is not between AI enthusiasts and AI sceptics. It runs between those who need full determinism and those who can contain non-determinism architecturally. On the deterministic spine.
Read article →Your Website Is Invisible — AI Ate Your Traffic
AI-powered search is replacing clicks with answers. Organic CTR has dropped 61% where AI Overviews appear. If your content strategy still targets page-one rankings, you are optimising for a disappearing metric. Here is what actually works now.
Read article →I Built AirTag in 1998
In 1998 I designed a GPS/ISM/GSM asset tracking system for logistics — the same architecture Apple shipped as AirTag 23 years later. It worked. It failed anyway. A story about innovation in Germany.
Read article →The M4 Mac Mini as a Local LLM Workhorse
I ran a base-spec M4 Mac Mini as a private AI inference server for months. 30 watts, silent, GDPR-compliant. Here is what works, what does not, and why local LLMs deserve a spot on your desk.
Read article →I Flew Drones Before They Were Called Drones
In 2012 I was building and flying unmanned aerial systems for aerial photography — years before consumer drones existed. One day, control was lost. The recovery involved telemetry interpolation from a moving car and a lucky two-metre landing strip.
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