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Thoughts on code,
craft & exploration.

A mix of technical deep-dives, career reflections, and dispatches from the road.

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CSS text-box-trim: The End of Fudging Vertical Padding thumbnail
developmentAug 13, 2026· 4 min
CSS text-box-trim: The End of Fudging Vertical Padding
Buttons that look bottom-heavy at padding: 12px aren't your fault, they're half-leading. text-box-trim finally lets CSS cut that invisible space, and it goes Baseline this month.
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Payment Fraud Detection and the False Decline Problem thumbnail
financeAug 12, 2026· 4 min
Payment Fraud Detection and the False Decline Problem
Card fraud systems score every transaction in well under a second, but the legitimate orders they wrongly reject cost merchants far more than the fraud they catch. A look at risk scoring, 3-D Secure, and the error nobody instruments.
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Obsidian Search Operators: Find Anything Without a Plugin thumbnail
obsidianAug 11, 2026· 4 min
Obsidian Search Operators: Find Anything Without a Plugin
Obsidian's core Search has a real query language hiding behind the search box. Here's how file, path, line, block, section, task, and property operators replace half the plugins people install to find things.
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Trusted Types Is Baseline: DOM XSS Is Now a Type Error thumbnail
developmentAug 10, 2026· 4 min
Trusted Types Is Baseline: DOM XSS Is Now a Type Error
Firefox 148 shipped Trusted Types in February 2026, making it Baseline. Here's how to turn every dangerous innerHTML assignment in your app into a TypeError you can actually catch.
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The Long Animation Frames API: Find What Actually Broke Your INP thumbnail
developmentAug 9, 2026· 4 min
The Long Animation Frames API: Find What Actually Broke Your INP
Your field data says INP is 400ms. Your local profile says everything is fine. The Long Animation Frames API closes that gap by naming the script, the function, and the character position that stalled the frame.
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KYC in the Deepfake Era: Why a Selfie Stopped Being Proof thumbnail
financeAug 8, 2026· 5 min
KYC in the Deepfake Era: Why a Selfie Stopped Being Proof
The document-plus-selfie onboarding flow every fintech copied is quietly failing. Here is how identity verification actually works, why injection attacks broke it, and what the layered replacement looks like.
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Obsidian Block Embeds: Stop Copy-Pasting Your Own Notes thumbnail
obsidianAug 7, 2026· 4 min
Obsidian Block Embeds: Stop Copy-Pasting Your Own Notes
Whole-note embeds are the easy part. Block references are where transclusion in Obsidian actually pays off, and where one misplaced caret silently breaks everything.
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GraphQL Trusted Documents: Stop Letting Strangers Write Your Queries thumbnail
developmentAug 6, 2026· 4 min
GraphQL Trusted Documents: Stop Letting Strangers Write Your Queries
Disabling introspection is not security. Trusted documents let your server execute only the operations your own developers wrote, and you probably already have the tooling for it.
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Self-Custody in 2026: The Seed Phrase Is No Longer the Only Way thumbnail
financeAug 5, 2026· 4 min
Self-Custody in 2026: The Seed Phrase Is No Longer the Only Way
Twelve words on a piece of paper used to be the whole story of crypto self-custody. Passkeys, MPC, and smart accounts have quietly changed what that phrase actually protects.
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Inline Dataview Queries: Live Numbers Inside Your Notes thumbnail
obsidianAug 4, 2026· 4 min
Inline Dataview Queries: Live Numbers Inside Your Notes
Dataview code blocks give you tables. Inline queries give you a single live value in the middle of a sentence, which turns out to be the feature you reach for far more often.
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