YEARS WEB DEV
20yrs
ONLINE · OPEN FOR FREELANCE BUILDS// BUILDING IN PUBLIC
$ whoami → captain-randomI BUILDRANDOMTHINGSon purpose,
in public.
Hi — I'm Captain Random. I build production software, weird little experiments, and document all of it honestly. This site is the public part: real projects, real workflows, real evaluations of the tools I use.
// WHAT THIS SITE IS ACTUALLY FORWhat I build,
What I build,
and why I'm still
excited about it.
AGENTIC AI & ARCHITECTURE
Building when code generation is free. How I architect agentic-first systems, what works in practice, what doesn't.
01RETAIL & HOSPITALITY OPS
23 years inside UK enterprise retail and hospitality. Real workflows, real failure points, real software-meets-floor knowledge.
02AI TOOL EVALS
Honest, practical assessments of Claude Code, Archon, and whatever else I'm shipping with. Includes what didn't work.
03CREATIVE AI
Music (Suno workflow), generative art, video. A hobby that produces real output, documented as it goes.
04BUILD IN PUBLIC
Projects from idea to implementation. The process is the point — failures included.
05LEARNING LOG
What I'm currently studying, how far through it I am, and whether it was worth the time.
06Recent writing.
AccessibilityBuild Log
#01Audits find what's wrong, not what's missing
A page-by-page audit ran for three days catching deprecated ARIA roles, fabricated copy, and missing hover-pause behaviour. Then I opened the site on my phone and the nav menu wasn't there. Not wrong. Just not there. That's a class of bug audits can't catch, and the fix isn't to audit harder.
Read post→
Build LogDevOps
#02macOS won't let your cron read your work: three days inside TCC
A daily launchd job that reads from /Volumes/b/ looked trivial. Three days, four wrong approaches, and one AppleScript .app bundle later, I'd learned why granting Full Disk Access to a shell script is a UI fiction.
Read post→
ArchitectureMDX
#03An MDX content pipeline grows three kinds of complexity
Naïve MDX setups (one file in, one HTML out) hit three walls as they scale. Routing complexity. Authoring complexity. Citation complexity. Each grows non-linearly with post count; each has a single high-leverage fix.
Read post→
Workshop.
Foundational stack · top 81,142,423 XP · as of 2026-05-26
#1 / 8LVL 71
TYPESCRIPT
Staff · 2,076 Commits508,378 XP
30% to LVL 7210,022 XP
#2 / 8LVL 57
PYTHON
Staff · 793 Commits326,885 XP
17% to LVL 589,515 XP
#3 / 8LVL 42
JAVASCRIPT
Senior · 190 Commits183,053 XP
78% to LVL 431,847 XP
#4 / 8LVL 27
PHP
Mid · 102 Commits75,973 XP
56% to LVL 282,427 XP
#5 / 8LVL 15
SHELL
Junior · 72 Commits25,304 XP
90% to LVL 16296 XP
#6 / 8LVL 12
MDX
Junior · 48 Commits14,925 XP
21% to LVL 131,975 XP
#7 / 8LVL 7
SWIFT
Junior · 9 Commits6,243 XP
90% to LVL 8157 XP
#8 / 8LVL 4
POSTGRESQL
Apprentice · 4 Commits1,662 XP
7% to LVL 5838 XP
Build log.
In your inbox.
New posts, project updates, and honest tool reviews — roughly every two weeks. No marketing. No sponsorships. Just what I actually built and learned.