Writing

Notes from real projects

Not tutorials. What broke, what I tried, and what it taught me — written for whoever hits the same thing next.

• July 30, 2026

  Taking minification offline: two Rust libraries, six platforms, seven languages

  Moving my VS Code extension from a minification API to local Rust minifiers fixed every feature complaint I had, and shipped a package that only worked on my own laptop to a few thousand people who were not me.

  • vs code
  • extensions
  • rust
  • release engineering
  • packaging
• July 28, 2026

  Shipping seven languages and showing everyone English

  My VS Code extension had shipped translations for seven languages since October. Nine months later I found out that six of those bundles had never been displayed to a single user, and that my i18n test suite had been asserting through the bug the whole time.

  • vs code
  • extensions
  • i18n
  • testing
• July 25, 2026

  How I fixed the macOS bug that broke every VS Code extension's tests

  My own extension's tests started failing on macOS. I chased the wrong cause first, then found someone else had already diagnosed the right one, and shipped the fix myself instead of waiting.

  • debugging
  • open source
  • macos
  • vs code
• June 30, 2024

  Building my first VS Code extension, from a web form to the Marketplace

  I was minifying legacy WordPress theme files by pasting them into a browser tab. Here's how that turned into a published VS Code extension, and the tooling it took to get there.

  • vs code
  • extensions
  • tooling
  • typescript