Writing
Notes on platforms, architecture, and the craft of shipping software.
I'm tired of the strawberry argument
Three letters, a real limitation, and an exhausting argument. Why LLMs can miscount the r’s in strawberry, why tokenisation is only part of the explanation, and what useful criticism would look like.
Read more →A place for the things I build
Introducing the Artetecha portfolio: five projects, the thinking behind them, and a clearer home for the design and development side of my practice.
Read more →WordPress isn't finished. The way most people buy it is.
A post arguing that selling WordPress in 2026 is ethically reprehensible made the rounds and was then deleted. Most of its criticisms are real — and almost all of them are procurement and hosting problems rather than CMS problems. Here is the honest scorecard, including the two that survive.
Read more →I lost patience with writing code, not with engineering
A short post of mine on AI-assisted coding struck a nerve. Here is the longer version, with the evidence: the research on AI and code quality is genuinely mixed, and the variable that decides which way it breaks is the experienced engineer who stays in the loop.
Read more →Making WordPress behave on Upsun
I wrote an open-source must-use plugin that teaches WordPress it is running on an immutable platform with instant production clones — so a preview environment stops being able to email real customers or charge real cards. Here is what it does and why.
Read more →The build with no database
The most satisfying diff of the migration was the platform config: three backing services down to none. Here is the whole file that runs this site, annotated — and why "no database" is the point, not a limitation.
Read more →Keeping fourteen years of URLs alive
Replacing the CMS is the easy part. Not breaking every link the old site ever published is the part that takes care — one regular expression, an ordered redirect table, and a way to prove it works.
Read more →Vectorising a 2012 logo
The last thing the WordPress-to-Astro migration left behind was a blurry PNG logo. Rebuilding it as a vector meant identifying a fourteen-year-old font, tracing three blobs pixel by pixel, and learning which cut of Pacifico I actually needed.
Read more →Artetecha is back
From a London consultancy to an Italian practice: why this site returned, and what it runs on now.
Read more →WordPress to Astro in a day
How this site went from a WordPress stack with three backing services to a static Astro build — content migration, redirects, and dark mode included — in a single working day.
Read more →How Open Source practices can help bridge the communication gap in remote-first companies
How the public-by-default communication, netiquette, and documentation habits of open source communities can fix the communication gap in remote-first companies.
Read more →The Invisible Gap: Inequalities Between Employees and Contractors in Remote-First Tech Companies
Why the contractor arrangements common in remote-first tech companies create real inequalities and legal risks, and how Employer of Record services can close the gap.
Read more →(Reverse) Polish Notation in JavaScript
Solving Polish and Reverse Polish Notation expressions in JavaScript, from a classic stack-based approach to a more elegant version using an operator map.
Read more →Making the most of old devices
How a rooted 2013 Minix Neo X7 Android TV box found a second life as a 30Mbps VPN router instead of ending up in a drawer.
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