03 Writing
Practical guides and thoughts on the things I build and notice.
Browse by topic
N°072 Keep the Story With the Photograph A family photograph can keep a face while losing its context. Keep names and remembered details beside it, without making remembrance another unfinished project. N°071 What to Read Before You Install an App From GitHub Read a GitHub app's purpose, releases, licence and data handling before installing. Use a completed worksheet that separates observed facts from unknowns. N°070 Remove the Location From an iPhone Photo Before You Share It Remove an iPhone photo's location before sharing. Check the sharing route and inspect a sample copy without confusing GPS removal with complete anonymity. N°069 Check Whether the Blacked-Out Text in a PDF Is Really Gone Check PDF redaction on the saved file. An original fictional example shows why a black rectangle, page-text removal and document cleanup are different. N°068 Find the Book Note You Remember but Cannot Name Find a book note in Obsidian from remembered words, a quotation or a topic. Try a small original practice vault with queries you can inspect and reuse. N°067 Cut Five Useful Minutes Out of a Two-Hour Recording Use LosslessCut to extract a useful section from a long recording. Use an illustrated timeline to understand how keyframes affect cut points. N°066 Make a Scanned PDF Searchable Without Retyping It Make a scanned PDF searchable with NAPS2, then check the recognised names and numbers. Try an original image-only sample before using your own documents. N°065 Send Files Between iPhone and Windows Without Messaging Yourself Send files between iPhone and Windows with LocalSend on a reachable local network. Use an original sample pack to check the copy you actually received. N°064 Why Your Logo Looks Blurry on a Website A blurry logo can come from too few source pixels or the wrong export. Compare original SVG and PNG samples before changing your website's design. N°063 Build a Business Someone Would Be Proud to Inherit Business stewardship asks what the next person inherits. Explore ownership, lasting commitments, and the freedom successors need to change a company well. N°062 What Should a Business Refuse to Sell? Premium service can fund extra care or charge twice for the same promise. Explore fairness, paid priority, and what a business already owes its customers. N°061 When the Score Becomes the Business Business metrics help when they explain the work. Explore how targets shape behavior, when incentives succeed, and what an owner should ask beyond the score. N°060 Can a Business Grow Without Getting Bigger? A business can improve profit and capability without adding headcount or locations. Learn which growth to pursue, which costs to count, and when expansion is necessary. N°059 A Coffee Shop Is Also Selling You Somewhere to Be Coffee shops can give customers a place to belong as well as a drink. Explore third places, the value of a familiar seat, and the business of keeping it welcoming. N°058 Why People Pay More for Less Choice Good curation can earn its price by reducing the work of choosing. Learn when a smaller selection helps, when it frustrates, and what makes advice worth paying for. N°057 Good Jobs Are an Operating Decision Good jobs need investment in people and work designed to let them succeed. Simpler operations can support better pay, dependable service, and a stronger business. N°056 What Happens to the Hour AI Gives Back? AI time savings become business value when recovered hours reach useful work, improve a customer outcome, or reduce spending the business would actually incur. N°055 A Little Hospitality Takes Some Discipline Thoughtful hospitality works when reliable service gives staff room to care. Fund small gestures, set clear limits, and let the customer keep the moment. N°054 Stop Making Customers Chase the Answer Failure demand makes customers chase work they already paid for. Find the unfinished promise behind repeat contacts and give both sides their time back. N°053 Which Customer Are You Built to Serve? Strategy means making choices that support one another. A useful customer promise changes what you sell, how you staff the work, and which orders you accept. N°052 Leave Room for Tuesday Spare capacity lets a service absorb ordinary surprises without breaking yesterday's promises. An open slot can earn its place before anyone fills it. N°051 The Mac Studio Stays Home. The Tablet Becomes the Console Run an M4 Max Mac Studio headless with an M5 iPad Pro or Xiaomi Pad 7 Pro using a native virtual display, secure remote access, and a tested recovery path. N°050 A Strong Network Is a History, Not a List Professional contacts become trusted relationships through shared context, small promises kept, specific help, continuity, and a history that makes recommendations safe. N°049 A Renewal Is an Operations Deadline Prevent a SaaS renewal outage by assigning one owner, deriving the decision date from the contract, testing payment, preparing a fallback, and proving service works. N°048 How a Virtual Assistant Becomes Part of the Business A virtual assistant career grows when visible results become business context, sound judgment, and ownership, while every opportunity still depends on fit. N°047 A Good Hire Still Needs an Operator A good hire still needs an operator to keep role scope, workload, measurement, authority, and client expectations aligned as the job changes. N°046 Give Your Virtual Assistant Work They Can Own The first work to delegate to a virtual assistant is a recurring responsibility, not a string of errands. Give it a visible finish and an exception path. N°045 What Ten80Ten Means Ten80Ten takes its name from a delegation rule that defines when clients set direction, when the team owns execution, and where judgment belongs. N°044 Write Design Rules People Can Use Without You A living design guide gives tested ideas an owner, records why they earned reuse, and changes when production reveals a better direction. N°043 Private Decisions Still Belong in the Team Record When a private discussion changes shared work, move the decision and its operating effect into the team record without exposing the sensitive reason. N°042 The Lowest Quote Still Has to Prove It Can Deliver Pricing credibility depends on whether scope, proof, responsibility, and service boundaries make the delivery promise believable at any price. N°041 A Good Cancellation Flow Respects the Customer Cancellation UX earns customer trust when the control is easy to find, billing effects are plain, data can leave, and confirmation is final. N°040 Unused Features Still Cost You Every Release Old software features keep creating work through testing, dependencies, support, explanation, and attention long after demand disappears. N°039 Write Code for the Person Who Has to Change It Readable code gives the next person clear names, local decisions, plain control flow, and comments that preserve why a choice was made. N°038 False Urgency Makes Real Deadlines Harder to See False urgency trains people to ignore alarms, scatters the attention needed for good work, and makes real deadlines compete with whoever shouts loudest. N°037 Watch the Work Before You Build the Feature Request A feature request names the solution a user can see. Good product discovery finds the difficult moment underneath it without dismissing the person who asked. N°036 Your Password Reset Flow Decides Who Gets Back In A password reset flow reveals whether a product can restore access without turning panic, support pressure, or an old recovery channel into a security shortcut. N°035 Build the Human Review Path Before You Automate Exception queue design preserves completed work, names the missing condition, assigns ownership, and provides a safe, auditable path back into automation. N°034 Why Dense Operations Software Can Be Easier to Use Operations software design keeps related facts together while protecting clear hierarchy, accessible interaction, and an operator's ability to act safely. N°033 Build a Developer Workspace You Can Return To Developer workspace optimization should preserve enough state to resume safely after interruption, without turning the workspace into a second product. N°032 Cut GitHub Actions Costs Without Weakening Releases Reduce GitHub Actions minutes by separating local verification, repository policy, and production deployment into clear, accountable release controls. N°031 How One System Prepares Every Prospect Before the Call OwnerFile screens two territories, carries five recurring prospecting responsibilities, and gives one operator a source-backed pursuit without automating away judgment. N°030 What n8n, Zapier, and Make Really Cost at 100,000 Runs At 100,000 runs a month, n8n vs Zapier vs Make cost depends on price units, ownership labor and whether five actions count one or five times at volume. N°029 Remove Personal Data Before an AI Model Sees It Leaky context mitigation needs 5 gates before a third-party model call: allow fields, detect PII, tokenize locally, enforce policy, then serialize. N°028 Employee Monitoring Should Protect the Worker Too HIPAA marks audit controls and activity review as required, not optional. Here is employee monitoring that produces evidence protecting the client and the worker. N°027 How Field Apps Should Save Work Without a Signal Safari clears all script-writable storage after seven days without a visit. Here is the offline mode queue that survives it and replays in the right order. N°026 The Same Property Looks Different in Every Spreadsheet Three CSVs, one owner, three spellings. Here is how to deduplicate spreadsheets with normalization and blocking before a unique constraint holds the line. N°025 Map 7,000 Land Parcels Without Freezing the Browser A county parcel export can run to hundreds of megabytes of text. Here is how to map 7,000 parcels without ever handing a large GeoJSON to the browser. N°024 Save Phone Webhooks Before You Process Them Twilio gives your endpoint 5,000 ms by default. Here is the ingestion buffer that turns dropped webhooks into a queue depth instead of a lost call record. N°023 Edit AI Writing Until It Sounds Human 13.5% of 2024 biomedical abstracts showed an LLM word pattern. Here is how to make AI writing sound human with specific edits that earn reader trust. N°022 How Many Cold Emails Can You Safely Send Each Day? Compare Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 sending limits with actual outreach capacity, follow-ups, reply handling, and sender-reputation controls. N°021 When Should You Replace SaaS With Custom Software? Replace SaaS with custom software only when the workflow, full five-year cost, control needs, and ownership capacity make the build case stronger. N°020 Get More Sales Calls to Show Up Reduce sales call no-shows with measured reminder tests, shorter booking lag, easy rescheduling, and live transfers when the prospect is ready now. N°019 Why Bulk Email Belongs on Its Own Subdomain Improve email deliverability with SPF, DKIM, DMARC, low complaint rates, clear unsubscribe controls, and a dedicated bulk-sending subdomain. N°018 An AI Agent Should Never Read and Act in One Step Prompt injection breaks any AI agent that reads untrusted text and can also act. The fix is architecture: the part that reads holds no tools. N°017 When AI Cold Calling Is Legal in 2026 Is AI cold calling legal? This 2026 guide explains TCPA and Telemarketing Sales Rule consent, opt-outs, disclosures, and evidence for every call sent. N°016 Where AI Phone Agents Work and Where Humans Take Over What an AI phone agent can and cannot do for lead qualification in 2026: the honest capability map, latency limits, and where a human takes over. N°015 Does the 5-Minute Lead Rule Actually Hold Up? Fast lead response is linked to higher contact and qualification rates. See what the 5-minute research supports, its limits, and how to test faster follow-up. N°014 What HTTPS Still Reveals to Your Internet Provider HTTPS hides page contents, passwords, and URL paths. DNS, SNI, ECH, VPN use, and shared IP hosting determine how much of the destination your ISP can infer. N°013 When Claude Fable 5 Is Worth the Price Claude Fable 5 costs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. See when its capability, safeguards, and 30-day retention fit. N°012 What HIPAA Software Must Get Right About Patient Data Learn what HIPAA software compliance requires, how encryption fits the required risk analysis, and when a vendor needs a Business Associate Agreement. N°011 Should You Run Hermes Agent Yourself? A free, self-hosted AI agent from Nous Research that turns repeated work into reusable skills. What it is, who it is for, and what you really need to start. N°010 Make Double-Booking Impossible in the Database Prevent double-booking with PostgreSQL unique and exclusion constraints. Compare fixed slots with overlapping time ranges and handle concurrent reservations. N°009 The Database Should Keep Every Customer's Data Separate Multi-tenant data isolation is strongest when row-level security enforces it in the database. One policy protects every query, including future ones. N°008 Use Simple Rules Before You Pay for AI Reduce LLM costs by routing predictable work through a keyword classifier first, measuring accuracy, and reserving model calls for ambiguous cases. N°007 Why Money Apps Need Double-Entry Bookkeeping Double-entry bookkeeping stops unbalanced transactions and gives every balance an audit trail. Here is what it guarantees, and why reconciliation still matters. N°006 Your Dashboard Should Tell You When It Breaks Dashboards that fail safely keep the work visible, mark uncertain data, and alert separately. Here is the design behind a trustworthy command center. N°005 Keep Call Audio Private With On-Device AI Keep AI transcription private by running the speech model on the laptop, with no cloud audio upload, plus the limits, hardware cost, and accuracy tradeoffs. N°004 Never Use Floating Point for Money Avoid binary floating point for money. Integer minor units and exact fixed-point decimals are both valid designs when currency and rounding rules are explicit. N°003 Sensitive Documents Are Safer When You Store Less Data minimization removes an unnecessary central copy of sensitive documents, while provider retention, logs, output storage, and backups still need controls. N°002 Why Live Data Still Needs a Source of Truth A live event is a partial snapshot, and the first to arrive is often wrong. Build self-correcting systems that reconcile against a source of truth. N°001 How to Stop AI From Making Things Up Reduce AI hallucination risk with grounded sources, deterministic checks, claim-level citations, representative evaluations, and accountable human approval.