Field Guides — Page 2
Field Guides go deeper than the blog - long-form, hands-on walkthroughs that take one topic from start to finish, gotchas and all. The kind of thing I wish I'd had the first time I hit the problem.
The First 90 Days
A standalone playbook for a fractional or new CTO's first 90 days, the 30/60/90 framework, listening tour, scorecards, and the scope-of-work and decision templates that make an…
The Boring Stack: Ship on a Single VPS
Deploy and run real apps on one VPS with Coolify, no Kubernetes, no serverless. Self-hosted PaaS, databases, TLS, backups, and zero-downtime deploys on a box you own.
The Agentic Solopreneur
Every piece of good advice about running a business alone used to come back to one constraint: there is one of you, and you have a fixed number of hours. Don't build software that…
Eval-Driven Development
Build a real eval suite from zero with Evalite, deterministic checks, LLM-as-judge, and the data flywheel that turns user feedback into a system that improves itself. The unit…
Context Engineering: The Craft of AGENTS.md
A build-along on writing, structuring, and evolving the context files (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, constitution.md) that steer coding agents. From a blank file to a living system that…
The Hypermedia Stack
Build one real app start to finish on Astro + Datastar + Directus, a hypermedia-first stack with a CMS backend, SSR endpoints that stream, and no SPA framework in sight.
Running the Fleet: A Field Guide to Multi-Agent Orchestration
You built one agent that knows you cold. Its own personality, a memory that survives, skills it runs your way. It's a great employee. It's also still one employee, doing one thing…
Building Your Agentic OS: A Field Guide
Two people can use the exact same AI agent and get wildly different results. It's almost never the prompting. One of them built a system underneath the tool (a layer that gives…
The AI-Era Fractional CTO's Field Guide
"Fractional CTO" has become one of those titles that means everything and nothing. If you're a founder, it's often unclear what you're actually buying, a part-time CTO? a fancy…
Migrating from HTMX + Alpine to Datastar: A Field Guide
For about two years, my default stack for interactive server-rendered apps was HTMX for the network and Alpine.js for the sprinkles of client state. It worked. It also meant I was…
Guide to datastar with Astro
Datastar is a hypermedia framework that gives you the backend reactivity of HTMX and the frontend reactivity of Alpine.js in a single, lightweight library. If you've been using…
MCP from Scratch
Every AI tool you've wired up by hand (the Slack integration, the database lookup, the "let the model read our docs" hack) is a one-off. You wrote the glue, you own the glue, and…