Developer's Notebook
Quick-reference guides, standard operating procedures and working notes on web development, servers, Git, game development and CLI tooling.
Written from real work rather than assembled from search results. Every entry is something that was actually done, kept because it was worth writing down.
Web Development
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Verify Security Headers Are Actually Being Sent
Apache can accept a perfectly valid security configuration and deliver none of it.
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SOP: A Working Contact Form with PHPMailer and Gmail
A contact form that silently stopped sending, what actually broke, and the setup that survives a rebuild.
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Lighthouse: What Actually Moved the Number
Notes from tuning a static site, including the changes that measured as nothing.
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A Renamed File Can Break Your Site For Nine Months
A stylesheet was renamed.
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What Front-End Development Is, and Why It Matters
Front-end development is the part of a site a person actually touches.
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Setting Up a Development Environment From Scratch
A working environment, a codebase you will keep, and the commands that get Linux from a fresh install to ready.
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HTML: The Parts That Matter
A short reference for what HTML is actually doing, written for the point where you have opened a text editor and want to know what you are typing.
Software Engineering
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SOP: Restart, Verify and Diagnose a LAMP + Gunicorn Box
The commands, in the order you actually need them, for a box running Apache in front of a Python app.
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Git: The Commands That Matter, and the One to Never Run
A working reference, not a tutorial.
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What a Software Engineer Does, and Where to Start
Notes on what the job actually is, why I started with web development, and how to pick the next language rather than guessing at it.
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Time and Project Management for Programmers
Programming is about getting to a minimum viable solution quickly and then refining it.
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Steps Become Routines, Routines Become Systems
How a single repeated action turns into a capability you can point at a problem you have never seen before.
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Building a Routine That Survives a Bad Week
Most learning plans are written on a good day and then tested on a bad one.
AI Systems Integration
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Enabling the Google Cloud Natural Language API
The setup steps for the Google Cloud Natural Language API, from creating the project through to calling it from a FlutterFlow app.
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An AI App MVP in Ten Days with FlutterFlow
A ten-day plan for getting a working AI-backed mobile app in front of users, using FlutterFlow for the interface and a hosted model API for the intelligenc