•6 min read
Who Watches the Watch List?
After three months of noise from one PHP path, the filter changed. The small promotion raised a larger question about how much judgement belongs inside a telemetry system, and who exercises it.
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The complete archive of articles, thoughts, and engineering notes.
•5 min read
What the Canaries Caught
A single thirty-day window made the scanning look like one steady thing. Three months shows the opposite: overlapping campaigns that surge and vanish, an edge that loses its lead and then takes it back, and a curated filter already drifting out of date.
Read more•4 min read
The Path Not Found Is the Point
This site's robots.txt politely asks crawlers to avoid six paths. None of the six exist. Anyone who asks for one anyway has just introduced themselves.
Read more•5 min read
Mechanical vs structural
Some code changes can be verified by reading the diff. Others require understanding the code. The split matters.
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Why Toronto! and Why, Toronto?
One CloudFront edge location dominated the probe traffic by a factor of six. Pulling that thread led to Azure Canada Central and a particular kind of internet scavenger.
Read more•4 min read
The Ambiguity of 2n
A homework photo turned a simple maths question into three valid answers and a late-night lesson in why notation matters.
Read more•6 min read
Knock Knock, Who's There?
A static site with no login pages, no forms, and no commercial value still attracts more than twenty thousand unsolicited requests a month. This is what that traffic contains.
Read more•5 min read
Why I Used CloudFront Functions Instead of Lambda@Edge
Why a CloudFront Function was the right choice for canonical host redirects and URL rewriting, and what would change that decision.
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Why CI took three minutes or fifteen
How a slow GitHub Actions run led to a handful of small fixes: browser caching, dropping WebKit, and understanding what --with-deps actually does.
Read more•8 min read
Self-Hosted Analytics on AWS
A privacy-preserving analytics pipeline on AWS, built to cost almost nothing.
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