notrab.dev

Lately I’ve been paying attention to how my mindset changes when I code with AI. It’s not just that things are faster. It actually feels like switching between different mental modes.

Sometimes I’m in what I think of as vibe coding. This is the experimental phase. It’s fast, playful, and driven by momentum. There’s a bit of an adrenaline rush in seeing ideas turn into code almost instantly. In this mode, my critical thinking is intentionally dialed down. I’m exploring what’s possible, not worrying too much about being right yet.

I started rebuilding this site on Christmas Day, once everyone had gone to bed. One of my first ships of 2026.

I wanted to keep the pixelated look that Serge designed last year, but with a throwback to the early days of my career... WordPress in the late 90s, and the K2 theme.

The last two years at Turso have seen me wear many hats. Developer Advocate, Engineer, Marketer, Writer, and Product tinkerer.

I've made the decision to take on a new challenge, and will be leaving Turso at the end of October, marking my two year anniversary. Here's a look back at what I achieved.

Building flexible, themeable interfaces doesn't have to be complex.

By combining Tailwind's data attribute selectors with environment variables, you can create a clean system that switches themes dynamically without JavaScript or complex state management. Shout out to Matt Evans for teaching me this trick in a recent collaboration.

This website runs on Astro, and like many of my other projects, I've built a custom newsletter system rather than reaching for a bespoke newsletter third-party service. Here's why and how I did it.

Most newsletter services either cost too much for small lists or come with limitations that don't fit how I want to engage with readers. I wanted something lightweight, cost-effective, and completely under my control.

I last wrote PHP professionally over 15 years ago. Back then, CodeIgniter and FuelPHP were my go-to frameworks—well before Laravel became the powerhouse it is today. After years in the Rails ecosystem, then Node, Go, React, and GraphQL, I decided it was time to come back.

And like any self-respecting developer, I built a framework to do it.