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Thoughts on software, technology, and whatever else I find interesting.

The plaque problem: introducing TrailTold

Trail history today is a weathered cast-aluminum plaque, a shallow official app, or nothing. TrailTold plays narrated history at the spot it happened, triggered by GPS as you walk. Here's what it is, how it's built, and exactly how far along it is.

July 31, 2026 · 7 min read

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Jul 31, 2026 · 8 min

TaleBound, day one: last-write-wins rows instead of CRDTs

I started an offline-first travel journal today. The interesting engineering bet is the sync layer: hand-rolled row sync with last-write-wins and visible conflict copies, not CRDTs. Here's the product, the design, and why the fancier option was the wrong one.

Jul 31, 2026 · 7 min

Astro 7 ships Vite 8, and Rolldown ate my Tailwind import

I expected the Astro 6 to 7 bump to bring Vite 6. It brought Vite 8, which bundles with Rolldown instead of esbuild, which resolves `@import "tailwindcss"` as a filesystem path. One ENOENT, one plugin swap, done.

Jul 31, 2026 · 6 min

Thirty-eight lines: patch-only Dependabot auto-merge

A Dependabot major broke main on one of my repos while I wasn't looking. The fix is one workflow file that approves and auto-merges semver patches and does nothing at all for minors and majors. No allowlists, no version parsing, no cron.

Jul 31, 2026 · 8 min

The geofence is not a PostGIS query

TrailTold runs on Postgres with PostGIS, and there is no ST_DWithin anywhere in the backend. The "did the user enter this radius" decision is forty lines of pure Dart on the device. Here's why the spatial database doesn't do the spatial part.

Jun 5, 2026 · 7 min

ONNX Runtime Inside NativeAOT .NET: The Embedding Pipeline, Tensor Plumbing, and Linking Gauntlet

A deep technical design for running ONNX Runtime on-device behind the dotnet-native-interop swap-in seam: the exact embedding pipeline (tokenize → int64 tensors → InferenceSession → mean-pool → L2-normalize → cosine search), OrtValue zero-copy vs DenseTensor, SessionOptions and execution providers on mobile, and the NativeAOT trimming/native-linking gauntlet that makes this the riskiest phase. Real Microsoft.ML.OnnxRuntime C#.

Jun 5, 2026 · 6 min

Putting ONNX Runtime Behind a NativeAOT .NET Engine: the On-Device AI Roadmap

The dotnet-native-interop POC was built around one swap-in seam — an ILanguageModel interface that the whole app streams through. This is the plan for what goes behind it: ONNX Runtime for on-device inference in .NET 10, why ONNX fits the NativeAOT/no-cloud constraints, and the toolchain risks that make on-device AI the last and hardest phase. Honest roadmap, with links to the seam and the design spec.

Jun 5, 2026 · 7 min

The two-IAM-roles trap in AWS SSM CD

Your GitHub Actions workflow can send the SSM command and still not be able to read its result. The role that calls SendCommand and the role that calls GetCommandInvocation are conceptually the same thing — but AWS doesn't think so, and your "successful" deploy will hang waiting for a status it can't fetch.

Jun 5, 2026 · 6 min

The post-checkout problem: bridging Stripe Checkout to your auth

Stripe Checkout completes. The user lands back on your site. Now what? The pattern almost nobody warns you about, and the 30-line endpoint that solves it.

Jun 5, 2026 · 9 min

Embedding a NativeAOT .NET 10 Engine in Native iOS & Android Apps

A proof of concept that embeds one NativeAOT .NET 10 shared library directly inside native iOS and Android apps, reached three ways — in-process FFI, a loopback HTTP server, and an encrypted SQLCipher store — with their costs charted side by side. Here's what it does, and why the missing ASP.NET Core mobile runtime pack and SQLite's missing iOS native library dictated every design choice.