notrab.dev

I started rebuilding this site on Christmas Day, once everyone had gone to bed. One of my first ships of 2026.

I wanted to keep the pixelated look that Serge designed last year, but with a throwback to the early days of my career... WordPress in the late 90s, and the K2 theme.

The last two years at Turso have seen me wear many hats. Developer Advocate, Engineer, Marketer, Writer, and Product tinkerer.

I've made the decision to take on a new challenge, and will be leaving Turso at the end of October, marking my two year anniversary. Here's a look back at what I achieved.

Building flexible, themeable interfaces doesn't have to be complex.

By combining Tailwind's data attribute selectors with environment variables, you can create a clean system that switches themes dynamically without JavaScript or complex state management. Shout out to Matt Evans for teaching me this trick in a recent collaboration.

This website runs on Astro, and like many of my other projects, I've built a custom newsletter system rather than reaching for a bespoke newsletter third-party service. Here's why and how I did it.

Most newsletter services either cost too much for small lists or come with limitations that don't fit how I want to engage with readers. I wanted something lightweight, cost-effective, and completely under my control.

I last wrote PHP professionally over 15 years ago. Back then, CodeIgniter and FuelPHP were my go-to frameworks—well before Laravel became the powerhouse it is today. After years in the Rails ecosystem, then Node, Go, React, and GraphQL, I decided it was time to come back.

And like any self-respecting developer, I built a framework to do it.

My relationship with Go goes back to my time at Moltin, a YC-backed startup where the backend was built entirely in Go and deployed on Kubernetes. I wasn't writing Go full-time then, but being surrounded by developers who discussed goroutines over breakfast rubbed off. In Developer Relations, I needed to write examples and demos in multiple languages, including our Go SDK, so I picked up the basics early on.

Fast-forward a few years, and while on holiday this time last year, I decided to dive deeper. I read two books on Go to properly refresh my knowledge. By then, I was already six months into my role at Turso, where, surprise — the platform stack is built in Go.