Launching the journal

Five case studies, and anything shorter had nowhere to go. A debugging trace, a pattern that kept paying rent, a skeptical read on whatever tool the timeline was annoyed about that week — all of it had to grow into a full case study or quietly die in Notes. Most of it died. This is the fix.

What this is

/blog runs four formats:

• Case Study — long form, artifacts attached, commit hashes within reach.
• Build Log — dated, mid-work, written before I know how it ends. This post qualifies.
• Field Note — skeptical take on something the timeline likes. Short enough to be arguable.
• Pattern — a rule I keep applying, why it works, and the day it won't.

Each post lands with reading time, tags, and (where relevant) an Artifacts aside — the commits, prompts, or files behind the claims. If the artifact doesn't exist, neither does the post.

Under the hood

• MDX with frontmatter that gets validated at build time. Type a bad date, break the build. Fair.
• /rss.xml generates from the same source — CDATA descriptions, RFC-822 dates, the whole nostalgia package.
• Google Search Console meta tag ships via env var. Committing a verification string to the repo felt petty.
• Analytics: GA4 with IP anonymisation, off by default for EU visitors until they say otherwise. proxy.ts (Next.js 16's rebrand of the middleware convention) reads Vercel's x-vercel-ip-country header and sets a geo-eu cookie. The client picks a path from there.
• No third-party tracking beyond that. No newsletter form. No "hey, got a sec?" popup.

What's next

First real posts land over the next two weeks. One Field Note on prompt patterns that quietly stopped working when I moved from Sonnet to Opus. One Build Log on Sprint 11, mid-sprint. One Pattern on STABLE_LOGIC.md — the file whose job is to keep Claude from undoing yesterday's fix.

Subscribe via RSS if you still live that way, or let the LinkedIn + dev.to cross-posts find you — Sprint 14 wires the automation that lands this exact post on both platforms. Assuming it works, which is itself a Build Log for later.