Technology
Shipping with Spacefast
I’ve been shipping real work on Spacefast since August — a docs site for WordPress core, reports for customers, even live checklists. Here’s how I use it, rough edges and all.
Journal
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Aug 10, 2026
Hiking Keauhou
Continue →: Hiking KeauhouI took 2 nights out of a family vacation to backpack across the Ka‘ū Desert Wilderness on the slopes of Kilauea in Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. It was totally worth it.
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Jun 26, 2025
The Deceptive Promise of AI
Continue →: The Deceptive Promise of AIThe promise of AI automating mundane tasks seems appealing but is fundamentally flawed. It may eliminate boring jobs, but it doesn’t provide economic security. Displaced workers will be forced to seek new employment. This will turn creative passions into money-making endeavors, stripping them of their joy.
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Oct 23, 2020
One year ago today …
Continue →: One year ago today …One year ago today, I sat in the National Mall and reflected on the inspiring atmosphere and the amazingness of my favorite PHP conf. Today, I mourn the loss of both.
Technology
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DailyMedToday: A Production Case Study in Semantic Search
The production case study: how DailyMedToday uses Laravel, pgvector, and embeddings so readers can search a meditation archive by state of mind — and the operational lessons learned.
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From Voice to Vectors: Building a Searchable Audio Archive in PHP
Transcribe, embed, search: turning hours of opaque audio into a semantically searchable archive that deep-links to the exact moment — ext-whisper, ext-infer, and ext-turbovec composed.
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RAG Over Markdown: An End-to-End Local Pipeline in Pure PHP
RAG without the vendor mystique: chunk, embed, index, retrieve, generate — a complete question-answering pipeline over markdown docs, every stage running locally in PHP.
Business
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Short Stints, Real Experience: Rethinking Career Tenure
The hiring world still clings to tenure requirements that ignore reality. I’ve been on both sides — rejecting candidates for short stints and creating holes in other engineers’ resumes myself. It’s time to rethink what “experience” actually means.
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Gratitude
Another leader once encouraged managers to express gratitude to their teams through hand-written thank you notes. This has evolved into an annual tradition for me. Sharing gratitude with your team is a way to show leadership, even outside of a management role.
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Burnout Prevention Through Strategic Reassignment
Corporate burnout prevention programs often miss the point entirely. Instead of addressing workload, unrealistic expectations, or systemic issues, they treat burned-out employees as the problem to be managed or removed from the equation entirely.
Security
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Password Security
How do you address password security? What controls do you put in place? Do they matter? What does a strong password look like? Learn how to protect your users in 2024 and beyond!
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Understanding access control
Every application that allows authentication requires a proven form of access control. It’s important to understand the different formats available.
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Adversarial mindsets
What’s the absolute worst thing that could happen with your application? How could an adversary leverage that mistake to their advantage?
Faith
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Gardening and God
It’s difficult to be working among creation and not think of the creator.
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Workaholics Anonymous
How do you define your happiness? How diverse is that definition? Who controls it?
Opinion
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From Defense AI Drift to Policy Enforcement: Why I Built Firebreak
I wrote earlier about why defense AI companies drift toward offensive applications. Today for a hackathon I built the engineering solution I wish had existed when I was inside that world. Firebreak is a policy-as-code enforcement proxy that makes pre-negotiated AI boundaries hold — automatically, at machine speed, with full audit trails.
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One Man’s Unsolicited Opinion on the WordPress 5.6 All-Women Release Squad
An all-women release squad for WordPress is long overdue. I’m excited to see what the new 5.6 release will bring to the community!
Writing
All serials & stories →Serial
The Mantle — Ch. 1
The Marshal is on the road from Farlight. In Stillwater, that means a judgment. Everyone already knows how that will end.
Also running
Advent of Evil