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Cross-Device Drafts with AES + Device Tokens

Here’s a problem that looks simple from the outside: someone receives a link to a long, multi-step form, opens it on their phone, gets interrupted partway through, and wants to pick it up on a desktop five minutes later. Same person, same form, different device. No accounts, no logins — they’re a one-time visitor, not a registered user, and asking them to create credentials before they can fill out the form would crater completion rates.

Monday, April 13, 2026 | 20 minutes Read
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Secrets at Startup: Why We Stopped Using Environment Variables

The 12-factor app is gospel. Factor III — “Store config in the environment” — has been repeated so many times that most engineers I talk to treat it as settled law. Put your database URL in DATABASE_URL, your API key in STRIPE_SECRET_KEY, your JWT secret in JWT_SECRET, and make the environment the contract between your app and the outside world. We used to do this. Every project had a sprawling .env file. Every docker-compose.yml had an environment: block ten lines long. Every CI pipeline had a “secrets” tab full of variables. Every developer laptop had a .env.local they’d copied from someone on Slack two years ago.

Monday, April 13, 2026 | 16 minutes Read
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Memex: One Engineer, Two Laptops, One Knowledge Base

I read Andrej Karpathy’s persistent-wiki gist back in April and immediately wanted to implement it — not as an abstract exercise, but as the fix for a specific problem I’d been living with for a while. I code in two environments. At work, I have a job with a specific stack, team conventions, and a deploy pipeline everyone has agreed on. At home I do a lot of side-project work on different infrastructure, different languages on different days, different tools. Two laptops, two stacks, one person. The tools are different. The coder isn’t — the judgment about what makes a good pattern, the instincts for what’s worth reaching for, the taste for what correct code looks like, the standards I hold myself to. None of that is supposed to change between contexts. If I’m going to ship high-quality code at work, I should ship high-quality code at home too. Same engineer, same bar.

Monday, April 13, 2026 | 9 minutes Read
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Hugo + Strapi + a Node.js Sync Script: Publishing to a Long-Running Hugo Server

I rebuilt my personal site last year on Hugo with a Strapi backend, all running inside Docker Compose on a box in my home lab. The stack is pretty conventional up to the point where you try to wire Strapi content through to a Hugo instance that’s already running. At that point the usual integration guides stop applying and you have to figure out the rest yourself. This post is about that last mile.

Saturday, July 26, 2025 | 22 minutes Read