Ideas worked through.
Practical notes on OpenClaw infrastructure, automation, software, and the decisions hiding underneath them.
Building DIY SEO Hub: An SEO Crawl You Can Keep
A walkthrough of DIY SEO Hub with five real screenshots: scan a website, inspect SEO findings, keep the SQLite database, and compare the next crawl after a fix.
See the screenshots and read the build →Let Me Log In: Giving OpenClaw a Remote Browser Handoff
A temporary link and six-digit code let you sign into the browser your Claw already uses. How the Docker browser, private broker, and public viewer work together, with screenshots and the security tradeoffs.
See the handoff and read the build →Building a Wake-Word Voice Assistant on a $30 Bluetooth Speaker
A $30 Bluetooth speaker, an Ubuntu mini-PC, and two Python daemons turn spoken requests into OpenClaw agent turns. With a photo and a captioned video of the working voice loop.
Watch the demo and read the build →How I Put My Gym Pass in Apple Wallet on iPhone and Apple Watch
A SwiftUI frontend and a Node.js signing service turn a member ID into a Wallet QR pass, with iPhone and Apple Watch screenshots from the projects.
Read the article →How I Built a LAN Honeypot to Spot Questionable Activity
Four decoy services, a constrained Docker shell, and a SQLite event history: building LAN Observatory, with screenshots from a real local test run.
Read the article →Giving My AI Assistant a Home with Home Assistant
Home Assistant in Docker, Caddy HTTPS, and a token for device control: how I added a smart-home API for my AI assistant while keeping Alexa working.
Read the walkthrough →How I Built Meta Glasses Support for OpenClaw
One iPhone app, one new backend: Bluetooth audio, spoken requests, durable completion summaries, and the architecture behind OpenClaw’s Meta glasses integration. With clearly labelled simulated app screens.
See how it was built →How I Put 100 OpenClaws Behind One LLM Gateway
One Anthropic-compatible endpoint now gives my OpenClaw fleet sticky subscription routing, automatic failover, per-claw accounting, and rolling token quotas.
Read the article →How to Detect the Carrier From a Tracking Number, Canada Post and Purolator Included
The real tracking-number formats for UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, Canada Post, and Purolator as regexes, the overlaps between them, the check-digit algorithms that settle most of them, and what to do when they don’t.
Read the article →A Double Opt-In Newsletter in Next.js with SQLite and Nodemailer, No Mailchimp
How this site’s newsletter works: signup, a signed confirmation link, one email per new post, and one-click unsubscribe headers, all on one SQLite table. With the CASL and Gmail bulk-sender rules it has to satisfy.
Read the article →Rocket.Chat 429 Too Many Requests: Stop Polling and Use the Realtime API
Rocket.Chat’s REST rate limiter allows 10 calls a minute per endpoint, shared by everyone behind one IP. How a polling integration failed every visitor at once, and the Node.js websocket client that replaced it.
Read the article →Event Sourcing on SQLite in Production: What 155,000 Events Taught Me
A single append-only events table in SQLite runs a real business. The schema, the projections, the background jobs that replaced a queue, and the outage that taught me where SQLite’s limits actually are.
Read the article →How to Connect a Self-Hosted OpenClaw to Xero Safely
A focused guide for home servers and other bring-your-own installations: connect Xero with one revocable gateway key, keep OAuth tokens off the claw, and put approval boundaries around bookkeeping automation.
Read the guide →An Eight-Second Ad, Rendered From Code
How the CargoPax promo was made with the Codex CLI: no video editor, one script that draws every frame as SVG and hands them to ffmpeg, and a re-render whenever the copy changes. The video is embedded.
Read the article →A Two-Minute Product Tour, Narrated by OpenAI’s Voice
How the Nestled walkthrough video was made: the narration written first, one audio clip per line from OpenAI’s speech API, Playwright recording the real site against seed data, and ffmpeg fitting the picture to the voice. Captions came free.
Read the article →Connect OpenClaw to Xero and Let It Do the Books
The Xero gateway is live for OpenClaw: one click from your account, one key per worker, tokens held and rotated by 8Examples, every call audited. How it is built, how to switch it on for a worker you already have, and what a month-end reconciliation looks like over Telegram.
Read the article →Xero Was “Operational.” I Still Couldn’t Connect My AI Worker
A stuck Xero developer flow shows why green infrastructure checks are not enough: test complete user journeys before release, then verify the critical ones in production on a regular heartbeat.
Read the article →How I Deploy to My Own Server with GitHub Actions
The two-repository deployment pipeline behind Inventory Shopify: parallel Docker builds on GitHub-hosted runners, GHCR as the handoff, repository dispatch as the release signal, and a labelled self-hosted runner replacing the production containers on my own server.
Read the walkthrough →A Vue Directive Worth Reusing: Copy to Clipboard
Building a small, typed Vue 3 v-copy directive, using it several times on one page, and testing both its lifecycle details and the real browser Clipboard API with Jest and Playwright.
Read the walkthrough →Giving OpenClaw a Phone
Connecting a self-hosted OpenClaw agent to the phone network so it can make outbound calls, keep its tools and context, and bring a human into a workflow when judgment is needed.
Read the walkthrough →A Coding Standard That Fails the Build
Turning a team convention into a custom Roslyn analyzer. SMART001 requires that any C# property ending in Enumeration be typed as a Smart Enum, and it ships as an error, so a violation breaks the build instead of adding a warning nobody reads.
Read the walkthrough →Give the Agent a Good Engineering Workflow
How a technical article goes from an AI-assisted draft to a deployed page: a coding agent working inside the real repository, the project’s own Playwright suite keeping it honest, and the GitHub Actions and Docker pipeline that was already there doing the publishing.
Read the walkthrough →The iPad Pro Is the Terminal, Not the Workstation
My iPad Pro development setup: rather than forcing a development stack into iPadOS, the iPad is a thin client onto real machines over a VPN and remote desktop, supervising AI coding agents that do the typing. Plus the OpenClaw capacity math and giving an agent a phone number.
Read the walkthrough →Every Language Feature, Version by Version
Three repositories that file every C#, JavaScript, and TypeScript feature under the version that introduced it, each one proven by a test that actually runs. How the toolchain is made the referee, and what came out of writing all three in unattended 30-minute terminal sessions.
Read the walkthrough →JetBrains HTTP Better Than Postman
A plain .http file in Rider replaced Postman, Fiddler, Thunder Client, and curl for manually invoking APIs. Environments, automatic JWT acquisition, raw responses, and the same requests against local and production, demonstrated on an event-sourced .NET API.
Read the walkthrough →How I Host 100+ OpenClaw Instances Without Paying for 100 Servers
How I built the infrastructure behind 8Examples OpenClaw hosting: isolated containers, working graphical browsers, residential egress, automated provisioning, and horizontal scaling.
Read the walkthrough →