One warm context beats five cold ones
Per-layer workers each pay full context assembly. Loading once and generating inline amortises it — and the measured saving was smaller than estimated.
On-Device AI
When a local model beats the API, and the three numbers that decide it
The crossover is computable, the three numbers disagree with each other, and almost nobody computes any of them.
Just published
When a local model beats the API, and the three numbers that decide itThe scoping conversation that stops a project going wrong in month threeMost productivity advice fails engineers, and the reason is measurableA bigger context window gave me a worse answer, repeatablyDay 100100 days of Compose: the eight ideas the other ninety-nine posts kept circling
Deep divesthe longest reads
An estimate is a distribution, and you reported the mode
Two weeks means the most likely case. What anyone planning around you needs is the spread.
There is no shared background work, because three platforms disagree about when
WorkManager schedules under constraints, iOS grants windows, the browser has none.
There is no shared way to store a secret, and that is the correct answer
Keystore and Keychain hold a key your process cannot read.
ignoreUnknownKeys is a compatibility policy you are choosing for everyone
Strict parsing is an outage on a new field; lenient is silent data loss on a rename.
Ktor plugin order is not style — it decides what gets retried
Install auth after retry and a refresh happens per attempt; before, once.
Shared navigation state and the one platform that kills your process
A back stack in memory is correct on desktop and loses the user's place on Android.
Remote config defaults that disagreed, and the feature that shipped twice
The fetched value is shared and the fallback is per platform.
100 Days of Compose
100 of 100 →
100 days of Compose: the eight ideas the other ninety-nine posts kept circling
A hundred days of Jetpack Compose, written by following the official documentation end to end. The APIs are many and the ideas are few; here are the eight that kept recurring, and an honest account of what the exercise missed.
- 99Glance looks like Compose and compiles to RemoteViews, which explains every limitation6 min
- 98Notifications are the one UI you can't build in Compose8 min
- 97Predictive back turns a commitment into a preview, and your BackHandler can break it8 min
- 96There are three kinds of inset, and using the wrong one is why your keyboard fights your layout7 min
- 95Edge-to-edge stopped being a choice, and most apps found out from a bug report8 min
Sections
All sections →296EngineeringCompose, Kotlin, and multiplatform work — the mechanism under the symptom.39AgentsDriving AI agents to software that is verified on a real device, not just compiled.37AI-Driven DevelopmentShipping production software with coding agents — context, evals, guardrails, and what breaks at scale.27ShippingStores, signing, provisioning, CI — the archaeology between "it builds" and "it is live".21On-Device AIModels that run on the phone — Gemini Nano, ML Kit, Core ML, and the latency and privacy maths behind them.15GrowthThe business half — search, audience, and what solo distribution actually costs.1NotesShort field notes — one problem, one cause, one fix.
—LifeWorking, learning, and the parts of this that aren't code.Nothing here yet
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The scoping conversation that stops a project going wrong in month three
Scope failures are discovered late and paid for by the engineer. These are the questions that surface them early.
Most productivity advice fails engineers, and the reason is measurable
Advice built for shallow task-switching inverts when the task takes forty minutes to hold in your head.
A bigger context window gave me a worse answer, repeatably
What you leave out of a context pack is a design decision, not waste.
100 days of Compose: the eight ideas the other ninety-nine posts kept circling
A hundred days of Jetpack Compose, written by following the official documentation end to end. The APIs are many and the ideas are few; here are the eight that kept recurring, and an honest account of what the exercise missed.
Glance looks like Compose and compiles to RemoteViews, which explains every limitation
Glance lets you write widgets in Compose-like Kotlin, but it emits RemoteViews rather than drawing. Knowing that explains the missing modifiers, the absent animations, and why state works the way it does.
Notifications are the one UI you can't build in Compose
A notification is rendered by the system UI, not your app, so Compose plays no part in its appearance. What a Compose app owns is the permission flow, the deep link, and the back stack the user lands in.
Series
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Complete 2024–2026
100 Days of Compose
One hundred days working through the official Jetpack Compose documentation in order, one topic a day. It starts from what you already know, and ends with the eight ideas the whole toolkit keeps circling. Each post takes a symptom, explains the mechanism underneath it, and shows how to prove it on a real device.
100 of 100
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436 posts so far, written and published solo — no paywall and no sponsor copy.