Writing & Ideas

Read-along audio on a website usually implies a server. Someone hits play, a server runs text-to-speech, streams the result, or at least looks up a recording…

"Fail in production" is the default. A broken link ships. A typo in a theme descriptor slips through. Frontmatter is missing a required field and the build…

There is a growing trend to render everything on the server dynamically. With the advent of Edge computing, we're told that dynamic rendering is basically…

You've seen the same site a hundred times. Same rounded corners, same gray-on-white cards, same hero with a gradient and a CTA. It looks fine. It also looks…

I get asked how wchen.ai handles multiple languages and how I keep English, Spanish, and Chinese in sync without drowning in copy-paste. The short answer: the…

The more you put into a skill, the more useful it becomes — until it isn't. A single SKILL.md that tries to cover every content type, schema, and voice rule…

You're reading a blog post written by an AI agent. But it sounds like me. That's not an accident. I built a skill — a reusable instruction set — that teaches…

You can run a static site with comments and activity without running a database or an API. The trick is to treat GitHub as the backend you never have to…

A static site doesn't run code when someone hits a page. That's the point. But a newsletter requires dynamics: accept a signup, send a confirmation email,…

Most advice for sending a recurring digest assumes you need a scheduler. A cron job, a Lambda on a timer, or a hosted service that runs "every Tuesday at 9."…

I wanted a comment section on writing and project pages without running a database or a custom API. Static sites are great until you need state that lives…

Picking an email provider for a newsletter or marketing drip feels like it should be simple. You need to send emails, collect subscribers, and maybe track…

Adding email to a static site should be a solved problem. I just needed to receive contact form submissions and send replies from my own domain. It sounds…

I used Netlify for years. It was the first platform that made deploying a static site feel effortless — git push, wait thirty seconds, done. For a long time,…

Every project starts with the same unglamorous decision: where does this thing actually run? Most developers treat hosting as a checkbox. Pick the default,…

I do not start a new project in Cursor. I start in ChatGPT. Before there is a repo, there is an idea. And before there is an implementation plan, there is…

The first time I used spec-kit, I fed it a vague paragraph about what I wanted and hit run. The spec it produced was technically valid — and practically…