the map
Every note, grouped by the kind of work it is. Take a spyglass to it, or read down the list.
standards
Holding many things to one bar: checks, conventions, house style, the stuff that drifts the moment nobody is looking.
control
Seeing and steering what runs. Dashboards, monitoring, the one place you look to know the state of everything.
- Sep 12, 2026 Seaworthy enough to launch The restore system finally got the part that matters: a button that reaches into a live database or folder and puts a named backup back, with the undo taken automatically before it touches anything. Once that stopped being a hope and started being a mechanism, the project itself was steady enough for the other thing that had been sitting on the list: a real version number, and a container someone other than me can pull.
- Sep 6, 2026 The visitor's gallery I run my projects out of bosun-x, and not all of them under the same name. One of those names is a business site I take client work through, and a client there wanted to see where their projects were up to. So they have a login now, to the part of bosun-x that's theirs, their projects, the tasks I've shared, the ideas they've brought me, a thread to talk in. Same bosun-x I use, filtered down and wearing that site's skin. There was no second system to build.
- Sep 4, 2026 Two gates and a fence bosun-x shows one person everything. Every project, every server, every private note. But I also build things for other people, and they would like to see how it is going without me mailing them a screenshot. Today's work is the mechanism for that. A client login that can only ever reach the projects done for them, enforced in one function, behind a build rule that fails if any other code reads the data directly.
- Sep 3, 2026 Launching the lifeboat An earlier note built the backups but never restored one. Since then bosun-x runs every backup through a real restore once a week, into a throwaway database with no network and no name, and counts what comes back. Any database can be put back from a button that dumps the old contents first, so the move is reversible. The recovery order is written down. And the keys and env files, saved nowhere before, now go off the box nightly, encrypted.
- Sep 2, 2026 Fitting out a home dockyard A start-to-finish walk through the setup I use to build things with an AI agent at home — the laptop you type on, an old laptop turned into an always-on server, where the projects and their state actually live, the plain-text control layer that keeps a dozen of them straight, and how it all joins into one private network once a project outgrows the house. Every term you might not know is a hover away.
- Sep 1, 2026 A lifeboat for every hull Every project I run has a git remote, so the code survives a dead machine. The databases, uploaded files and secrets do not. This is the backup system I built into bosun-x in a day. bosun-x owns the config; a separate agent holds the credentials and does the dumps; the sensitive one is encrypted; and one screen shows whether every project has a current copy off the box.
- Aug 30, 2026 The chart room How I keep twenty-odd projects, five machines, and two AI agents in sync from a single dashboard built entirely out of plain Markdown and YAML files. The folder layout, why every status check is recomputed live instead of stored, and the plain-text handoff format that lets two agents continue each other's work.
infrastructure
The layer underneath: the overlay network, the hosts on it, the path a change takes from a commit to being live.
- Sep 13, 2026 Dressing the ship One of the businesses I build for wanted a way to quickly generate glossy social media images without opening a separate design tool every time: the right size and shape for IG or FB with all their very particular bells and whistles. You know, the exact thing graphic artist use templates in Photoshop for. That's the thing though... once your style and branding is locked in, most of the time you're only making minor tweaks and changing the source image - so what if they could have those templates ready to go in their CMS where the content copy is done, and social media image become 'swap image, update title, go.'?
- Sep 12, 2026 Seaworthy enough to launch The restore system finally got the part that matters: a button that reaches into a live database or folder and puts a named backup back, with the undo taken automatically before it touches anything. Once that stopped being a hope and started being a mechanism, the project itself was steady enough for the other thing that had been sitting on the list: a real version number, and a container someone other than me can pull.
- Sep 9, 2026 A hull that leaves My setup for web apps assumes a machine that is always on, holding the running thing. A phone app breaks that assumption completely. The app runs on a phone in someone else's pocket, and there is no berth of mine to keep it at. Here is the local Android dev setup I ended up with instead, walked end to end. What runs on the laptop, what the emulator is for, where the build happens, and how a saved file reaches a running app a second later.
- Sep 6, 2026 The visitor's gallery I run my projects out of bosun-x, and not all of them under the same name. One of those names is a business site I take client work through, and a client there wanted to see where their projects were up to. So they have a login now, to the part of bosun-x that's theirs, their projects, the tasks I've shared, the ideas they've brought me, a thread to talk in. Same bosun-x I use, filtered down and wearing that site's skin. There was no second system to build.
- Sep 5, 2026 Teaching others, one morsel at a time I've been working on another project for bite-sized learning with the aim of teaching 'anyone anything' using small questions, used in various ways to bring meaning and context to knowledge they're imparting. There's a few patterns to teaching this way, like using the same concept four or five times across a course and never ask identical questions. Beyond the broad(side) stroke concept is the app mechanics: The mission design, the spaced-review engine that decides when you've actually got something, the sync that never invents your history, and the consent model sitting under class/family reporting.
- Sep 4, 2026 Two gates and a fence bosun-x shows one person everything. Every project, every server, every private note. But I also build things for other people, and they would like to see how it is going without me mailing them a screenshot. Today's work is the mechanism for that. A client login that can only ever reach the projects done for them, enforced in one function, behind a build rule that fails if any other code reads the data directly.
- Sep 3, 2026 Launching the lifeboat An earlier note built the backups but never restored one. Since then bosun-x runs every backup through a real restore once a week, into a throwaway database with no network and no name, and counts what comes back. Any database can be put back from a button that dumps the old contents first, so the move is reversible. The recovery order is written down. And the keys and env files, saved nowhere before, now go off the box nightly, encrypted.
- Sep 2, 2026 Fitting out a home dockyard A start-to-finish walk through the setup I use to build things with an AI agent at home — the laptop you type on, an old laptop turned into an always-on server, where the projects and their state actually live, the plain-text control layer that keeps a dozen of them straight, and how it all joins into one private network once a project outgrows the house. Every term you might not know is a hover away.
- Sep 1, 2026 A lifeboat for every hull Every project I run has a git remote, so the code survives a dead machine. The databases, uploaded files and secrets do not. This is the backup system I built into bosun-x in a day. bosun-x owns the config; a separate agent holds the credentials and does the dumps; the sensitive one is encrypted; and one screen shows whether every project has a current copy off the box.
- Aug 31, 2026 What changed since you last played Steam already shows a combined news feed for the games you own, but you cannot search or filter it and the ordering barely makes sense. Here is the feed I built for Playtopia.com.au instead, with the same official posts sorted properly, made searchable and filterable, and everything published since you last played each game marked.
- Aug 29, 2026 A key with one job A container needed to read three remote machines over SSH without holding a key that could also root them. The exact authorized_keys options that pin a key to one read-only command and a single permitted tunnel, what each one does, and the break-in tests that prove it holds. Copy it for anything that has to phone home from inside a container.
workstation
The machine the work happens on. The compositor, the shell, the dotfiles, everything downstream of a fresh install.
- Sep 9, 2026 A hull that leaves My setup for web apps assumes a machine that is always on, holding the running thing. A phone app breaks that assumption completely. The app runs on a phone in someone else's pocket, and there is no berth of mine to keep it at. Here is the local Android dev setup I ended up with instead, walked end to end. What runs on the laptop, what the emulator is for, where the build happens, and how a saved file reaches a running app a second later.
- Sep 2, 2026 Fitting out a home dockyard A start-to-finish walk through the setup I use to build things with an AI agent at home — the laptop you type on, an old laptop turned into an always-on server, where the projects and their state actually live, the plain-text control layer that keeps a dozen of them straight, and how it all joins into one private network once a project outgrows the house. Every term you might not know is a hover away.
the toolbox
Every technology that has turned up in a note. Follow one to see where.