Writing
Field notes from load-bearing work.
Everything here comes out of systems we actually run: the deploys, the costs, the guarantees that turned out to be narrower than we thought. Written for the people who have to maintain this stuff.
Written by Christopher Diggs, Founder & Principal Engineer at Keystone Web Media.
- Operations7 min read
One missed webhook is not a broken integration
We concluded a deploy pipeline was broken, deployed around it three times, and were wrong. The evidence never supported the diagnosis.
Read - Web8 min read
What Google means by low value content
Our own site got rejected for it. The phrase is vaguer than the fix, and the fix is more measurable than it sounds.
Read - Web5 min read
One brand name, two products, and the confusion in between
A rejected website does not block YouTube earnings. They share a name and almost nothing else, and the mix-up sends people chasing the wrong fix.
Read - Design6 min read
Designing a lead magnet people actually keep
Most downloadable PDFs are read once and never opened again. The ones that survive are built to be screenshotted.
Read - Systems7 min read
Your kill switch is a hypothesis
Four times a guarantee I thought was structural turned out to be probabilistic, and the one question that would have caught all of them.
Read - Operations6 min read
Your deploy pipeline is not a backup
We audited our own repositories and found three of four had no off-machine copy, while shipping to production successfully every week.
Read - Operations5 min read
Push-to-deploy without the accidents
Connecting git to your host means a stray push reaches customers. Here's the gate we put in front of the site that takes payments.
Read - Web6 min read
What the parser sees
A résumé that looks perfect on screen can lose its entire education section when a machine reads it. The same is true of your website.
Read - AI5 min read
Cutting AI generation costs by a third without touching quality
The savings weren't in a cheaper model. They were in a parameter that was on by default and doing nothing we needed.
Read - Data8 min read
Your winner is a denominator artifact
We scored 2,916 videos to pick a market. The raw leader turned out to be one small channel counted twenty-one times.
Read - AI7 min read
Never let the model render the text
Image models are good at pictures and unreliable at typography. Splitting the two made our branding consistent by construction, and made misspellings impossible.
Read - Engineering7 min read
The worst bugs don't throw
A script that fails loudly costs you an hour. A script that produces confident, wrong output costs you whatever you built on top of it.
Read - Web6 min read
Two choices or three: the consent banner decision
Both options are offered as standard. Only one of them puts declining on equal footing with accepting, and regulators have been explicit about which they expect.
Read - Operations6 min read
Buy the answer instead of arguing about it
We spent about $95 to settle a production question three people could have debated for a week. It was the cheapest decision in the project.
Read - Engineering7 min read
Config that lies to you
Three settings problems that produced no error message: an environment file that silently wins, a theme block that emits nothing, and a script that dies on a punctuation mark.
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