Writing
FeedEngineering and tech write-ups, project breakdowns, journal entries and research notes. Everything I build, learn and think about.
51 posts
Hubble's Flawed Mirror: How 1.3 mm Blurred a Space Telescope
How one misplaced lens let the Hubble Space Telescope reach orbit in 1990 with a mirror polished precisely to the wrong shape and what that teaches about trusting a single test.
Git Hooks That Have Saved Me: Secrets, Big Files and Force Pushes
The three global Git hooks I run on every machine, what each one checks and the real mistakes they have stopped before they reached a remote.
How the Transistor Got Small: From a Germanium Slab to Billions on a Chip
A short history of the device inside every electronic product: the 1947 point-contact transistor, the integrated circuit, the MOSFET, Moore's law and why shrinking stopped being simple. Written for students who use microcontrollers without thinking about what is inside.
Open Source as an Organisation: A Monorepo With Read-Only Split Repos
How MELOPHOS keeps every component in one repository for reviews while publishing each folder as its own read-only repository with real history, using git subtree split and one GitHub Actions workflow.
The Isolation Forest, Explained Without Maths
A plain-language explanation of the Isolation Forest, one of the most practical anomaly detection algorithms: why odd points are easy to separate, how a forest of random cuts turns that into a score and where it goes wrong.
Thank You, Stanmore
The Stanmore College teachers who moved me into engineering, taught me the maths I thought was impossible, gave me the name Zac and made sure I could learn with one eye. Plus the cards I have pinned above my desk ever since.
Alerts That Do Not Cry Wolf: The Three-in-a-Row Rule
A model that flags 5% of healthy readings will page someone constantly if every flag is an alert. How PHAEMOS turns noisy anomaly scores into trustworthy alerts with a run of three, a clear rule, a critical level and one ticket per fault.
Building Zacess: A Reader That Respects the File
Zacess is a free, open-source reader that turns PDFs, scans, Word files and web pages into notes in your own reading profile, reads them aloud and keeps every file on your device. Why I built it, how it works, short demos, the matching code themes and what it cannot do yet.
Calibrating Anomaly Scores: Why One Formula Flagged Every Reading
PHAEMOS flagged 100% of its own training data as anomalous because of a one-line normalisation formula. How I found the bug, calibrated the Isolation Forest against its own decision boundary and gave each sensor node its own model.
Invited Back by Sky: A Black History Month Screening of Animol
Being shortlisted for the Sky Black Heritage Undergraduate of the Year award led to an invitation to a Black History Month screening of the Sky Original film Animol, with a live Q&A and networking.
Ariane 5 Flight 501: How a Number Too Big for 16 Bits Destroyed a Rocket
In 1996 the first Ariane 5 broke up about 40 seconds after launch because reused software converted a 64-bit value into a 16-bit integer. A walk through the inquiry report and the lessons I take from it as a student who writes embedded code.
Moving a Production Database When the Free Host Shuts Down
Vitafolio went down one evening because its free MySQL plan powered the database off for inactivity. This is how I diagnosed it, moved every table to TiDB Cloud the same night and checked nothing was lost.
One Palette, Eight Terminals: Building Accessible Terminal Themes
How one JSON file and a small Python script generate a high contrast light and dark theme for Terminal.app, iTerm2, Windows Terminal, Ptyxis, GNOME Terminal, Alacritty, Kitty and Hyper, with every colour held to a contrast floor in CI.
Accessibility as a Default, Not a Feature: WCAG 2.2 AA in Practice
What building Vitafolio to WCAG 2.2 AA actually involved: contrast in two themes, alternatives to dragging, sign-in without puzzles and why I now treat an accessibility problem as a bug.
One Command to Set Up Any Machine: Bootstrapping macOS, Linux and Windows
How I turned three machines and a pile of setup notes into three public bootstrap repositories that set up macOS, Ubuntu (WSL2 included) and Windows 11 in one command, safely and repeatably.
How I Started With Competitive Programming (and What I Got Wrong First)
A journal entry on starting competitive programming: the first few weeks on Codeforces, what Neetcode and LeetCode taught me that I could not get from coursework and the specific mistakes beginners make that I made too.
On Being Uncomfortable: Why I Keep Choosing Hard Things
A personal essay on discomfort, choosing difficult paths and what I have learned from consistently putting myself in situations where I do not know what I am doing yet.
Eleven Things That Actually Help When Learning to Code
Not 'learn Python first' or 'do LeetCode every day'. The things that actually made a difference when moving from knowing nothing to shipping things: how to read documentation, how to get unstuck, how to build the habit.
Python Type Annotations: What I Actually Use and Why
A practical guide to Python type hints: where they help, where they get in the way and the specific patterns I reach for when annotating FastAPI handlers, dataclasses and utility functions.
Navigating UK Engineering as an International Student: What No One Tells You
The practical and personal side of studying Electronic Engineering and Computer Science in the UK as an international student: the paperwork, the culture shock, the academic differences and what actually helped.
