Engineering notes
Infrastructure, systems administration, and lessons from the day job.
Systems, decisions, and lessons learned.
Context Implementation Lessons learnedWhen a long back-and-forth with an AI finally lands somewhere good, the method is worth more than the answer. How I pull the method out and turn it into a prompt I can run again.
Building with Claude and MCP · Note 5 ↗Stop making admins with a SQL INSERT, give every person and script its own account at the lowest role that works, and switch off the dashboard's file editor. A short hardening list for WordPress.
The WordPress toolbox · Note 6 ↗My DevOps reference note is a stack of prompt cards for everything from repo setup to installers. Condensed: which cards earn their keep for one person, what to watch in each, and the order I'd run them.
Dev habits for a team of one · Note 3 ↗GitHub, Trello and a database are the three MCP servers my notes kept coming back to. All three had drifted since I wrote them down. Here's what's current, and how I'd lock each one down.
Building with Claude and MCP · Note 4 ↗A custom slash command is a saved prompt you run with a slash. How they work in Claude Code now that they've been folded into skills, and which of the ones in my notes actually have a job.
Building with Claude and MCP · Note 3 ↗My notes on safe updates were written for a big team with canary releases and approval chains. Here's the same idea cut down for one person with a project that still has to work tomorrow.
Dev habits for a team of one · Note 2 ↗My old CLAUDE.md template tried to hold everything. The one that runs this blog is about twenty lines. Here's where the file lives, what earns a line in it, and what doesn't.
Building with Claude and MCP · Note 2 ↗The WordPress database is where sites actually break. Back it up first, clean it with WP-CLI instead of raw SQL, and never swap URLs with a plain REPLACE, because serialized data won't survive it.
The WordPress toolbox · Note 4 ↗How to add an MCP server to Claude Code or Claude Desktop, where the config actually lives, and the short checklist I run when a server won't show up.
Building with Claude and MCP · Note 1 ↗The folder layout, the one config file, and the handful of checks I want in a Python project before the first real line of code. Plus where my notes had fallen behind the tools.
Dev habits for a team of one · Note 1 ↗Every WordPress site since 5.6 can be driven over HTTPS with an application password and nothing else installed. Here's how to read, create and update content from PowerShell.
The WordPress toolbox · Note 2 ↗Your scroll area has overflow:auto, the layout is 100vh, and the whole page scrolls anyway. Blame the automatic minimum size of flex items, and fix it with one line.
Building this notebook · Note 7 ↗
