Field Notes
I’ve spent two decades on financial systems — the kind that move money securely, process millions of transactions, and have to stay stable when traffic spikes. This site is for the smaller systems I build on my own time: personal automation, data pipelines, tools around the house. Different scale, same priorities — make it work when it’s needed, and keep it working as things change around it.
2026
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From Case Study to Starter Kit
The case-study post described the shape of the system: an archive, a set of dashboards, a review loop that kept both honest. That was enough to explain how it worked. It was not enough...
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A Personal Decision System Built on Top of a Document Archive
The archive described in an earlier post solved a filing problem. Documents had stable names, a small set of categories, and explicit rules for the cases that did not fit neatly. That made the...
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Separation of Duties: Making Parallel Agents Behave Like a Team
The previous post split one generalist sweep into several narrower agents, each with its own scope, talking to each other through a shared inline-flag protocol. That solved coordination: agents could leave each other messages...
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From One Auditor to a Council of Specialists
The archive-reorg post described a weekly auditor: one skill that swept my document archive and the reference notes layered on top of it, fixed the mechanical problems, and flagged the rest for me. That...
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Turning a Health Chart Into an Actual Plan, and Keeping It Current
Two earlier posts here cover getting health data collected (synced automatically from a phone into a structured file) and getting it organized (filed into a clean, current-state layer on top of a personal archive)....
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Syncing Samsung Health Data to Google Drive via Android Health Connect
Two people in my household wear Samsung devices and use Samsung Health. Its dashboard is fine for a quick glance, but it doesn’t give you a portable, queryable, long-term record, and it can’t show...
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What Actually Fixed a Decade of Google Drive Sprawl
A shared household Google Drive accumulates documents for years before anyone treats it as a system rather than a dumping ground. Mine had two dozen top-level folders, several of them near-duplicates: a typo’d second...
2025
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Windows + WSL Development Environment (Setup Guide)
This is how to reproduce my current development environment:
