obscuretone is a collection of systems notes, software projects, and essays on reliable systems, practical architecture, AI-assisted workflows, hiring systems, and the organizational incentives around software work.

About This Site

The Crown is symbolically enormous, constitutionally important, and in ordinary legislative processing behaves like a service dependency expected to return assent.

My Cat Could Be The Crown

This article looks at how startup success is shaped by execution, timing, capital, regulation, and privilege rather than grit alone.

Startup Myths, Structural Advantages, and Real Execution

This article explains how practical experience, continuous learning, and measurable outcomes can build senior engineering capability outside a traditional degree path.

Building A Career Through Practical Experience

A 2026 retrospective on AI-assisted software development, arguing that AI amplified experienced developers first, made routine work cheaper, and moved the real bottleneck into review, QA, and accountability.

AI Did Not Replace Developers. It Changed The Bar.

A post-mortem on Nova Scotia's FOIPOP breach, the teenager accused in it, and the public pressure campaign that turned a quiet government security failure into an accountability problem.

FOIPOP - The Hack That Wasn't

Hiring behaves like a badly replicated distributed system: postings, recruiters, candidates, managers, budgets, and ATS records all drift out of sync, and candidates pay for the inconsistency.

The Job Market Is Eventually Consistent

A political worldview is not enough. It needs a deployment target, and every available target has horrible implementation details.

Fork The Party

This article compares the three pillars of Canadian government to a PID controller, suggesting that an elected senate would lead to resonance.

Should Canada Elect Senators?

A thought experiment about an AI sovereign as a harder test of intelligence than conversation alone, especially when faced with novel crises, legitimacy, uncertainty, and moral tradeoffs.

Could AI Govern?

EMH started as an attempt to replace keyword-based first-line HR screening, then evolved into an evidence-grounded platform for comparing one resume to one job and generating application-specific resume drafts.

EMH - Building A Hiring Platform Around Evidence

Hiring rejections increasingly behave like silent software failures: candidates invest time, employers provide little signal, and the feedback gap gets worse as application volume rises.

Job Not Found

Canadian government looks strange because it is a working legacy system: old interfaces, ceremonial dependencies, undocumented conventions, and terrifying migration risk.

Canada Is A Legacy System

Hiring starts by compressing people and work into tiny artifacts, then pretends the artifacts contain enough signal to make confident decisions.

Resumes And Job Descriptions Are Lossy Compression

A project note on Nira, a local issue tracker built around a CLI for automation and agents, a web UI for humans, and SQLite state stored with the workspace.

Nira - Designing Tools For Humans And Agents

A satirical engineering proposal to flood the Chignecto Isthmus and make Nova Scotia's geography match its culture, written with the full seriousness of a public infrastructure review.

Nova Scotia Should Be An Island

Measurement is useful until the metric becomes the job. This article looks at handle time, engineering dashboards, OKRs, and return-to-office mandates as examples of numbers replacing judgment.

Pieces Of Flair

Party labels look like clear types, but local politics is full of implicit conversions, overloaded names, and values that only make sense at runtime.

Politics Is Not Strongly Typed

A project note on PyGameBoy, a Python Game Boy emulator that uses flat memory, opcode dispatch tables, NumPy rendering, and audio-clock synchronization to reach real-time performance.

PyGameBoy - Writing A Game Boy Emulator In Python

If an economic system has to change, people still need food, housing, medicine, payroll, power, schools, and hospitals while the migration runs.

Refactoring Capitalism With Zero Downtime

A project note on a small Linux PAM module that checks system uptime as a narrow authentication control for physical-access scenarios.

Simple PAM - Using Uptime As An Authentication Signal

Fast resume screening compresses professional history into a headline, rewarding titles, brand names, and flashy numbers while pushing the real evidence into fine print.

The Ten-Second Resume Is An Advertisement

A project note on using deliberately small todo applications to compare frameworks, persistence models, runtime choices, and architecture tradeoffs.

What Todo Apps Are Good For

Production incidents are not a badge of honor, but they are a real signal of engineering experience. The useful interview question is not whether someone has broken production, but what happened afterward.

Tell Me About The Last Time Something Broke In Production

A project note on implementing the classic XKCD Tasks problem with EXIF parsing, geospatial boundaries, and computer vision classification.