Things written down
The parts of a project worth writing down: the traps, the reasons behind a choice, and the things that only made sense afterwards.
2026
- 06
Bundle Watch: when a discount quietly stops working, the merchant is the last to know
A Shopify bundle app that models bundles as discounts rather than as bundle products, and tells the merchant when another promotion eats the bundle discount — plus why a bundle torn in half is worse than one that never applied, why conflict detection depends on your api_version, and one failure that happened all on its own.
- 05
Jot: write a thought down in three seconds, from anywhere
A quick-capture notes tool that lives in the macOS menu bar: press ⇧⌘J, type, press Return — the note is saved and the panel is gone. No account, no network, no "which notebook does this go in". Plus why Chinese search needed a different tokenizer, and three keyboard bugs that only showed up once the app was actually driven.
- 04
Stop conda from auto-activating base in every new shell
One line — conda config --set auto_activate false — takes (base) out of your prompt. Plus which file it writes, the older key name, and why this is more than tidiness.
- 03
Orthoshot: ten standard views of a part, in one drag and drop
When a quote needs part views, the person who needs them usually has no CAD licence. This is a browser tool that opens STEP, measures it, estimates its weight and exports ten standard views in one click — with nothing uploaded, because the geometry belongs to someone else.
- 02
Why lexical retrieval for Chinese cannot use tsvector
PostgreSQL full-text search cannot segment Chinese; the whole sentence becomes one token. So the lexical arm runs on character trigrams, fused with vector search by RRF — and then I measured it, and the win was smaller than I expected.
- 01
Paper Anchor: an open-source paper reader that pins every answer to the page
A self-hosted two-pane reader for papers: every claim the LLM makes is a clickable citation that jumps back to the highlighted source on the PDF. MIT, bring your own key, embeddings can stay entirely local.