engineering

Engineering · 27 Oct 2026 · 5 min

Most of the open source we release starts as a feature a client project needed and paid for. We ship it in small, frequent releases under semantic versioning, so older projects stay on the version they were built on and upgrade when they choose. Why that works, and where it bends.

Engineering · 20 Aug 2026 · 14 min

Atelier is built for people who have never heard of Drupal and will never open a terminal. That single fact turns 'it upgrades itself' into a veto over the dependency list — and a refactor where I had to say no to modules we wanted, delete code we were proud of, and start reading other people's roadmaps.

Drupal · 18 Aug 2026 · 5 min

One ring drawn in the wrong place. Chasing it turned into a rewrite — because Drupal stores no parent pointer for revisions, and "parent" means three different things on a translated node.

Engineering · 6 Aug 2026 · 17 min

I gave an AI agent full access to a broken robot. It ran better experiments than I would have, ruled out six causes by measurement, and then wrote 'definitively exonerated' about a part it had no way to inspect. Every correction came from something I knew and it structurally could not — and one of its confident errors nearly went out in a warranty claim.

Engineering · 22 Jul 2026 · 7 min

A recurring claim: 'I added llms.txt and nothing reads it — zero hits.' Almost every time, the zero comes from checking the wrong instrument. Client-side analytics is structurally blind to a plaintext file fetched by a bot. Here's why, and where the real answer lives.

Engineering · 26 May 2026 · 7 min

The day I stopped writing classList.toggle('enabled') around an async submit and started deriving the button's state from the form. A walk through why toggle is a weaker promise than set — and why even set is wrong, just more slowly.