2 November 2026 · Latest
Coding with Claude: A Developer's Playbook
The follow-up to Architecting with Claude: a free, hands-on book for developers using Claude Code, plus Acme Expenses, the open-source app it builds one chapter at a time.
28 entries
The journal
Build notes from the lab and the day job — what I tried, what broke, what I learned.
31 October 2026
Architecting with Claude: The Principles
I converted a stack of old Flex apps to React with one prompt each. Then I was asked to explain how. "It just worked" was not an answer, so I wrote a short book on the principles behind it, plus a cheat sheet and a slide deck.
24 October 2026
contextls: What Do My AI Coding Tools Actually Read?
A Rust terminal UI that shows, for any folder, which CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, rules and memory files each of 15 AI coding tools loads — in load order, with on-demand summaries through the CLIs you already have.
24 October 2026
Receipts That File Themselves: Retiring AI Rename for a dot
AI Rename gave PDFs good names, but naming was the easy part. How my purchase paperwork moved from a Mac app to a dot, OpenAI's always-on agent.
24 October 2026
Retiring AI Rename
AI Rename, my on-device PDF renamer for macOS, is leaving the App Store. Here is why, what happens to existing installs, and a note on what replaces it.
6 September 2026
MermaidViewer 1.10: From a Prompt to an Editable Diagram, Now with CLI Support
Create and refine Mermaid diagrams with on-device Apple Intelligence, then edit them on a native Mac canvas. Updated for MermaidViewer 1.10 with CLI support.
5 September 2026
Accent: Building a Private English Pronunciation Coach with Apple Intelligence
Building an iPhone pronunciation coach: local speech recognition follows your reading, Core ML flags sounds to revisit, Apple Intelligence writes the drills.
5 September 2026
Spaceship Dashboard: A Starship Console for Your Mac That Now Lives on Your Apple TV
How a Star Trek-inspired SwiftUI dashboard grew into a wall console: zero-CPU Core Animation, a native tvOS receiver over Bonjour and developer telemetry.
13 August 2026
SQLiteUI: Drop a SQLite File, Get an ERD, a Data Browser, and a Whole App
How I built SQLiteUI, a browser-only SQLite viewer with a Sugiyama ERD layout engine, domain colour classification and a UI view built from foreign keys.
11 August 2026
HaveIRead: A Calm Little App That Answers One Question About Your Books
How I built haveiread.app on Convex: a reading tracker that imports Kindle, Kobo and Libby libraries in the browser and dedupes them into one answer.
3 May 2026
Capvera on the Web: Porting a SwiftUI iPad App to Convex with Server-Side AI
Porting the SwiftUI Capvera real-estate app to the web on Convex: multi-provider AI extraction, workpool batches, schema-driven UIs and market intelligence.
24 February 2026
MermaidViewer 1.7: Visual Diagram Editor, Quick Look & Markdown Editing
MermaidViewer 1.7 adds a visual editor for building flowcharts and sequence diagrams by clicking, macOS Quick Look integration and in-place markdown editing.
22 February 2026
MermaidViewer 1.5: Themes, Seventeen Diagram Types, and Teaching AI to See Differences
MermaidViewer 1.5 grows into a full native diagramming app: 17 diagram types, a theme studio, hand-drawn rendering, Quick Look and AI-powered visual comparison.
15 February 2026
SendToAI: A Multi-Engine AI Action Runner for iPhone and Mac
An early look at SendToAI, a SwiftUI app that runs AI actions across Apple Intelligence, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude with one tap on iPhone and Mac.
7 February 2026
Gitsanity: A Git Analytics Dashboard Built in Four Days with OpenAI Codex
How I built a native macOS Git analytics dashboard with DuckDB, star schemas, and parallel indexing — entirely using OpenAI Codex for Mac in just four days
1 February 2026
DMGMaker: Creating Beautiful Disk Images for macOS App Distribution
How I built DMG Maker, a SwiftUI Mac app for creating DMG installers with drag-and-drop input, AI-generated backgrounds and a pixel-perfect preview.
31 January 2026
DocIQ: From Real Estate Documents to Universal Document Intelligence with SwiftUI and AI
Building DocIQ, a macOS document intelligence engine that extracts structured data from PDFs across fifteen industries, entirely with Claude Opus 4.5.
30 January 2026
Capvera: Building Portfolio Intelligence for Real Estate Investors with SwiftUI and AI
Building Capvera, an iPad-native real estate portfolio manager, with Claude Opus 4.5 in Cursor: SwiftData modelling, financial calculations and a macOS demo.
30 January 2026
MermaidViewer: Rewriting MermaidJS in Swift – A Fresh Take on Diagram Rendering
Building a native macOS Mermaid diagram viewer by rewriting the MermaidJS rendering engine in Swift. An early preview of native performance for diagrams.
20 January 2026
SQLite ERD Viewer: Visualizing Database Schemas with Beautiful Diagrams
Building SQLite ERD Viewer, a native macOS app that turns SQLite database files into interactive, colour-coded entity-relationship diagrams in SwiftUI.
14 January 2026
Folder Analyzer: Understanding Where Your Storage Goes with Beautiful Visualizations
Building Folder Analyzer, a native macOS app that scans millions of files with Swift concurrency and shows disk usage as an interactive treemap.
13 January 2026
WebStage: Your Mac as a Backstage Controller for Multiple Displays
How I built WebStage, an Electron app that turns your Mac into a backstage controller for web views across displays, with Chrome TV and iOS remote apps.
14 December 2025
Behind the Scenes: Building MarkView.app with Bolt.new (Video)
Watch the full development journey of MarkView.app—a terminal-styled Markdown presentation tool—built using Bolt.new with 108 AI prompts
12 November 2025
How I Wrote a Swift Mac App Without Speaking Swift: Building AI Rename
Can you build a native macOS app without being a Swift expert and without coding? The story of creating AI Rename using AI assistance
21 October 2025
Building MarkView.app in 90 Minutes with Bolt.new: A Developer's Journey
How I built a complete markdown presentation viewer using Bolt.new, from initial prompt to production-ready app in just 90 minutes
10 November 2024
Deploying with surge.sh: A Simple Static Site Solution
Exploring how Surge.sh is used for deploying static websites, with real examples from n-so.com
9 November 2024
Evolution of My Company Website: Embracing Simplicity
A journey from complex Next.js setups to a streamlined React application
8 November 2024
Hello World
The first post on n-so.com: why Daniel Wanja rebuilt his site with MDX, and what the journal and the lab of Mac apps will cover.