My House, My Things is on the iPhone
The iPhone app is out, on the same purchase as the Mac. £19.99 for both, once, and your house syncs through your own iCloud rather than a server of mine.
Writing on building, shipping, and the odd tangent.
Notes from running a small WordPress agency — the tools I build to make it saner, and the occasional detour into weightlifting or a joke shop that sells nothing.
Meat, the luxury product
I've been vegetarian for five years and I don't think you need to be. The argument that works isn't what's on your plate, it's what it costs to put it there.
The advice about AI and text in images is out of date
I wanted a wartime propaganda poster with a slogan on it. Every rule of thumb says set the type yourself. Gemini spelled it correctly first time.
WordPress, then React, now Swift
Three defaults in about ten years, and why none really replaced the one before. What changed wasn't the tools, it was the shape of what people asked for.
I could have made it a subscription. I didn't.
My House, My Things is bought once, not rented. A record isn't a service: it doesn't need to be running to be useful, it needs to still be there in ten years.
If you build it, they won't come
The line is a misquote, and it was never a distribution plan. What actually happens after you ship something, and why building is the easy part.
When was the boiler last serviced?
I couldn't say when my boiler was last serviced or what the kitchen paint was. The answers existed, just nowhere I could find them. So I started building.
Why I folded my free tool into the agency site
Plugin Risk Score had its own domain for a while. Moving it onto the agency site was the right call — and the reasoning applies to most free tools.
I made my SaaS self-hostable. My laptop had been lying to me.
Stripping three vendor dependencies out of SendTidings was the easy part. The interesting bugs turned up once I stopped testing on the machine where it worked.
Why I swapped my MacBook for a Mac mini
Moving from an M1 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM to an M4 Pro Mac mini with 24GB — for local AI, long agent sessions, and a machine that never sleeps.