Articles
Observations from 35 years of building, breaking and fixing systems. Architecture, security, AI and the decisions that connect them.
Gold-Plating Analysis Is Not a Prompt — It Is an Engineering Problem
Detecting Gold-Plating in EU directive transpositions requires more than asking an LLM for differences. The hard part is separating legitimate discretion, inherited national law and genuine overreach in a traceable analytical process.
Read article →Why Shell, Regex and ASN.1 Are Suddenly Sexy Again
Some technologies never died – they were merely displaced. AI is now democratising complex tools and rehabilitating the formal. On the quiet renaissance of robust architectures.
Read article →When the Vibes End, the Thinking Begins
Vibe Coding flatters an era that believes complexity can be replaced by intuition. But a system is not born the moment something runs on screen. An essay on the difference between producing and understanding.
Read article →AI Is Splitting the Engineers – and the Answer Is Architecture
The split is not between AI enthusiasts and AI sceptics. It runs between those who need full determinism and those who can contain non-determinism architecturally. On the deterministic spine.
Read article →Your Website Is Invisible — AI Ate Your Traffic
AI-powered search is replacing clicks with answers. Organic CTR has dropped 61% where AI Overviews appear. If your content strategy still targets page-one rankings, you are optimising for a disappearing metric. Here is what actually works now.
Read article →I Built AirTag in 1998
In 1998 I designed a GPS/ISM/GSM asset tracking system for logistics — the same architecture Apple shipped as AirTag 23 years later. It worked. It failed anyway. A story about innovation in Germany.
Read article →The M4 Mac Mini as a Local LLM Workhorse
I ran a base-spec M4 Mac Mini as a private AI inference server for months. 30 watts, silent, GDPR-compliant. Here is what works, what does not, and why local LLMs deserve a spot on your desk.
Read article →I Flew Drones Before They Were Called Drones
In 2012 I was building and flying unmanned aerial systems for aerial photography — years before consumer drones existed. One day, control was lost. The recovery involved telemetry interpolation from a moving car and a lucky two-metre landing strip.
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