Writing
Honest thoughts on data engineering, career transitions, and the tools that actually work.
My site was fine, but it didn't feel like me. How a website refresh with Claude Code turned into a full rebrand, from the design system to a new mark with Bali and Aotearoa roots, and the process you can steal.
An hour and a half of 4K footage, two accents the transcription couldn't handle, and zero editing skills. How I went from an SD card to a branded YouTube episode in a few hours with Claude.
In May I researched headless CMS and decided I didn't need one. In September, work handed me a real reason to need one, and the answer turned out to be a spreadsheet.
Helping trace a confusing error meant actually reading someone else's code end to end, a genuinely rare move in the age of AI autocomplete. What I found was a JWT pattern more mature than mine, which turned into standardising two-layer auth across three internal APIs.
A meaningful number of RADAR drivers stuck on the MFA step, an MFA code landing on a family member's phone instead of their own, and the Graph API call the portal wouldn't let me shortcut. The whole messy timeline, vendor search included.
I had never touched on-prem AD before. One data flow insight, one Friday, and a lot of asking why later, we had something running in production.
A bus driver kiosk with no login screen and no one to click it. An 8-hour cookie with no refresh endpoint, a CORS gotcha nobody warned me about, and what I learned owning up to the parts I got wrong.
A driver end-of-duty check that has to work with a tap and nothing else, no login, no app, no PIN. Claude and ChatGPT reviewed the design separately and disagreed about whether a JavaScript hop was worth keeping.
The vendor app requires RDP to run on a tablet. The database is ours. Four AIs independently agreed on the architecture. The hardest part is understanding what the old app actually does.
I have a signed royal court family tree that traces my lineage back to the Majapahit era. I want my kids to know where they come from. So I built an immersive scrollytelling site to bring it to life.
Vercel got hacked in April 2026. Not because their security was bad. Because someone they trusted got hacked first. Here's why that matters, and what vibe coding culture has to do with it.
Excel revolutionised accounting, but that revolution is now decades old. For those straddling the worlds of finance and data, DuckDB might be the tool you've been waiting for.
A brutally honest account of SSL errors, mysterious IPs, infinite redirect loops, and what a former accountant learned about DNS the hard way, while trying to connect this very site to Azure.
Power BI is great, until you do the maths on per-seat licensing for people who just need to view a dashboard. Here's how I moved a live report to Azure Static Web Apps using DuckDB-WASM, kept all the interactivity, and cut the cost to essentially nothing.
I used to be one of Power Apps' biggest advocates. Here's why AI coding assistants changed my mind, and what it means for the future of low-code.
MagicPattern. GitHub. Azure SWA. Cloudflare. Kiro. Five tools, zero hosting cost, full ownership. This started as documentation for a mate setting up a recruitment business website. Then I thought: might as well just make it a blog.
The last post killed Power BI for static reporting. This one kills it for streaming too. Azure Functions, Web PubSub, a React SWA, and a Google Maps integration that turns a pretty dashboard into something ops actually uses.
A banking headline about a $253 million profit hit sent me down a rabbit hole I wasn't expecting. Turns out the way companies account for software they build might quietly shape whether they decide to build it in the first place, especially if a sale or IPO is on the horizon.