Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More

Category: Projects (Page 1 of 36)

Posts introducing, updating, and covering various projects to which I’ve contributed or that I maintain.

Building (and Evaluating) a Codebase Onboarding Skill for Claude Code

If you spend any meaningful amount of time working with Claude Code, you’ll eventually hit a familiar wall: you open a conversation, ask it to do something, and it starts poking around your project like it’s never been there before.

Because it hasn’t. Every conversation starts fresh.

That’s fine for small projects. But when you’re working across a monorepo with a dozen cloud functions, shared utilities, and deployment scripts, watching Claude re-explore the same directory tree for the fifth time in yet-another-worktree in a single day, it gets old (and expensive, as far as tokens are concerned).

So I built /onboard. It’s a Claude Code skill that scans the current working directory, builds a structured summary of the codebase, and caches it so future conversations can skip the discovery phase entirely.

It started life as a slash command called /ingest, but I’ve since ported it to a proper skill with smarter defaults and a key-files-first approach that keeps token costs down.

Granted, it’s very much experimental right now (so much so I’m documenting the process of evaluating it).


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Mute Menu Notifications: A WordPress Plugin for Silencing Update Badges

I wrote this plugin a few years ago to scratch a personal itch: those red notification badges in the WordPress admin menu were more annoying than not while I was trying to focus on other things. (I knew I had updates to complete but I do them on my own schedule and didn’t want the visual noise whenever I was working on something else.)

The original version was a single-file plugin that got the job done, but only good enough. It worked by hiding badges with JavaScript after the page loaded, which meant you’d see them flash for a split second on every page. The toggle was a site-wide option, so if one admin muted notifications, every admin lost them. And the AJAX call used GET for a state-changing action, which was more of a quick hack to get it working than anything else.

So I rebuilt it from scratch. This is version 2.0.0.


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Where Can I Watch? 1.2.0: Episode Tracking and More

Where Can I Watch? started off as an app with a single purpose: tell me what service is streaming a show or movie. But the more I used the app (and the more a few users contacted me), the more it made sense to also track all of the shows and movies that are being watched. And with shows, there are obviously multiple episodes and, for most, multiple seasons.

So in the latest version, in addition to fixing a few things, I added per-season episode tracking. 1.2.0 has shaped up to be the biggest feature release since the initial launch of the app.


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BurnRate 1.4.0: It Updates Itself Now

A few weeks back I shipped BurnRate. It’s a small macOS menu bar app that shows your Claude Code usage limits at a glance. It had a solid enough response and a some people dug it enough to use it daily (myself included, of course).

But there’s a problem: how do those people know when there’s a new version?

The answer, until now, was “they don’t.” They’d have to check in with me or the product page or just stumble into it.

Not exactly ideal

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