Articles

Long-form pieces. Essays, devlogs, deeper dives.

The Formative Years

2026-01-30

Castle Adventure title screen

The Conversation

3 AM. Late January. First commit:

# [redacted] Home Infrastructure

An hour later: dozens of files. Thousands of lines. Complete CLI framework. Ansible playbooks for DNS, DHCP, VMs, backups, provisioning. Docker roles. CloudFormation templates. Full documentation.

Not copy-paste. Timestamps don’t lie. This was a conversation.

Same kind of conversation from decades ago. Child typing commands into DOS. Castle made of ASCII. Learning that the machine answers if you know how to ask.

The Radar Paradox

2026-01-28

License Radar’s visual identity wasn’t designed. It was discovered.

The Iterations

Synthwave phase

Synthwave. Neon cyan, magenta, glow effects. Fun. Fatiguing. Gone.

Terracotta phase

Terracotta. Notion vibes. Felt like a project management tool. Wrong personality.

Transitional phase

Zinc + vivid green. Green from 60s phosphorus radar displays. Right direction. But vivid green on muted backgrounds — half the UI screaming, half whispering.

Subtraction

The fix wasn’t additive. Bulk transformation across 30 files. Pulled saturation out of everything. Vivid green (#22c55e) became forest (#3d7a5c). Fire-engine red became brick. Yellow became antique gold.