A personal site by Marty — software, hardware, AI, gaming, finance, homesteading, and whatever else is on my mind.https://martyw.dev/https://martyw.dev/posts/how-i-build-nestjs-services/https://martyw.dev/posts/how-i-build-nestjs-services/Close to a decade and dozens of production services in: the project structure, dependency injection rules, test harness, consumers, migrations, auth and monitoring I start every Nest.js project with, plus the skills that let an agent verify its own work.Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTsoftwarejavascriptgraphqldatabasesaihttps://martyw.dev/notes/postgres-on-commit-drop/https://martyw.dev/notes/postgres-on-commit-drop/TIL that CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE in Postgres takes an ON COMMIT clause: Three settings. PRESERVE ROWS is the default and keeps the table around for the whole…Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:04:00 GMTsoftwaredatabaseshttps://martyw.dev/posts/coding-from-my-phone/https://martyw.dev/posts/coding-from-my-phone/Terminus, Tailscale, and a NUC in the study. The setup I use to get real work done from a phone, and the two places it stops being pleasant.Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTsoftwareaitoolshardwarehttps://martyw.dev/notes/relink-codex/https://martyw.dev/notes/relink-codex/Threw together Relink Codex — playstyles, combo routes, weapons and sigil loadouts for all 28 characters in Granblue Fantasy: Relink. Two things collided. The…Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:50:00 GMTgamingwebsoftwareaihttps://martyw.dev/posts/ask-for-the-method-not-the-fix/https://martyw.dev/posts/ask-for-the-method-not-the-fix/Six months of confident, plausible, wrong fixes for the same Postgres incident — and what changed when I stopped asking Claude for a patch and asked it to teach me how to diagnose one.Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTsoftwareaidatabasestoolshttps://martyw.dev/posts/steam-machine-vs-a-build/https://martyw.dev/posts/steam-machine-vs-a-build/Valve's Steam Machine landed in Australia at $1,609. I priced a cheaper build, a like-for-like one, and a higher-end one against it — and thanks to the RAM crisis, the usual just-build-one answer isn't the walkover it normally is.Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThardwaregaminghttps://martyw.dev/posts/everything-you-own-asks-for-something-back/https://martyw.dev/posts/everything-you-own-asks-for-something-back/Not the one-plant, two-t-shirts kind of minimalism. A slower version built around a single idea — cost of ownership — and what changed once it clicked: a simpler wardrobe, a quieter desk, a streamlined digital life, and a noticeable weight off.Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonalminimalismhttps://martyw.dev/posts/social-idealisms-arent-values/https://martyw.dev/posts/social-idealisms-arent-values/Most of what people call their values — being active, a big social circle, a good career — are really social idealisms: the life they think they should want. A short take on the distinction John DeMartini draws in The Values Factor, and the test for telling the two apart.Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonalbookshttps://martyw.dev/posts/raise-your-hand-first/https://martyw.dev/posts/raise-your-hand-first/Owning a mistake looks like it should cost you standing. Done consistently and meant, it does the opposite — here's the outage that taught me why, and the mechanism underneath it.Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonalcommunicationhttps://martyw.dev/posts/the-bill-for-being-direct/https://martyw.dev/posts/the-bill-for-being-direct/Most people who call themselves brutally honest just can't read the room. Being direct when you can read it — and saying the true thing anyway — is a different trade, and the bill comes due differently at work than at home.Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonalcommunicationhttps://martyw.dev/notes/summer-game-fest-2026-perfect-lineup/https://martyw.dev/notes/summer-game-fest-2026-perfect-lineup/Summer Game Fest dropped on Friday and somehow the lineup read like it was scraped straight from my wishlist. Three of my favourite franchises, all in one…Sun, 07 Jun 2026 20:09:00 GMTgaminghttps://martyw.dev/notes/rapier-for-the-game-engine/https://martyw.dev/notes/rapier-for-the-game-engine/Spent the week deciding on a physics engine for the game engine and landed on Rapier. It's written in Rust and ships to the browser as WASM, which sounds like…Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:01:00 GMTsoftwaregamingjavascriptwebhttps://martyw.dev/notes/comments-are-down-thats-the-deal/https://martyw.dev/notes/comments-are-down-thats-the-deal/The comments on here are down right now. They run on Cusdis — open-source, on their free hosted tier, and the most lightweight option I could find. I've used…Mon, 01 Jun 2026 11:08:00 GMTmetasoftwarewebtoolshttps://martyw.dev/posts/stable-urls-without-a-redirect-table/https://martyw.dev/posts/stable-urls-without-a-redirect-table/A short random prefix plus a throwaway slug gives you URLs that survive title changes — no UUID ugliness, no slug-history table. Plus why the collision-retry loop matters more than the keyspace suggests.Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTsoftwarewebapishttps://martyw.dev/posts/how-this-blog-gets-written/https://martyw.dev/posts/how-this-blog-gets-written/How posts and notes here actually get made — AI-assisted, with a structured pass that flags speculation rather than laundering it as fact.Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTmetaaitoolshttps://martyw.dev/notes/arcade2d-finally-started/https://martyw.dev/notes/arcade2d-finally-started/Two years after writing up some ideas for a JavaScript game engine, I've finally started building it. Early days, but it lives at arcade2d.com.Thu, 28 May 2026 10:00:00 GMTsoftwaregamingjavascriptwebhttps://martyw.dev/notes/new-site-new-shape/https://martyw.dev/notes/new-site-new-shape/New site, new shape. The old one was a developer-CV-with-blog. This one is broader — software, hardware, AI, the homestead, gaming, the occasional…Thu, 28 May 2026 09:00:00 GMTmetaaishowerthoughthttps://martyw.dev/posts/my-2026-tech-stack/https://martyw.dev/posts/my-2026-tech-stack/Two years on from the 2024 list. The shipping-code part has changed completely; most of the rest looks the same — and where it doesn't, the reasons are worth knowing.Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTsoftwarewebaimetatoolshttps://martyw.dev/posts/rent-vs-buy-spreadsheet/https://martyw.dev/posts/rent-vs-buy-spreadsheet/For a couple of years I was sure that renting and tipping the difference into index funds beat buying. Then I bought a smaller, older house on a worse street — and worked out what the spreadsheet had been missing about leverage and tax.Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTfinancehomesteadhttps://martyw.dev/notes/caches-need-an-invalidation-story/https://martyw.dev/notes/caches-need-an-invalidation-story/The instinct when something's slow is to put Redis in front of it. Sometimes that's right. Often it's a way to defer thinking about the actual problem, with…Fri, 29 Aug 2025 09:00:00 GMTsoftwarewebhttps://martyw.dev/posts/promise-all-isnt-batching/https://martyw.dev/posts/promise-all-isnt-batching/When parallelising N small queries looks like a fix and is really just self-DoS at a slightly higher concurrency level.Tue, 26 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMTsoftwarejavascriptwebapishttps://martyw.dev/notes/group-in-the-database/https://martyw.dev/notes/group-in-the-database/A common shape: fetch a flat list of rows, then group them in application code into a Map before returning. It works, it's familiar, and it's nearly always…Tue, 19 Aug 2025 09:00:00 GMTsoftwarehttps://martyw.dev/posts/write-batch-shaped-functions-by-default/https://martyw.dev/posts/write-batch-shaped-functions-by-default/Why I write repository methods that take arrays and return Maps, even when the only caller — today — is asking for one thing.Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMTsoftwarejavascriptapishttps://martyw.dev/notes/dataloader-cache-off-by-default/https://martyw.dev/notes/dataloader-cache-off-by-default/The dataloader package ships with caching on. For the GraphQL resolver tree it was designed for that makes sense — stable reads within a single request are…Wed, 06 Aug 2025 09:00:00 GMTsoftwarejavascripthttps://martyw.dev/posts/batching-requests-we-dont-control/https://martyw.dev/posts/batching-requests-we-dont-control/How pushing dataloader up to the HTTP controller — out of the resolver layer it usually lives in — cut downstream database load by 83% on a read-heavy endpoint.Fri, 07 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMTsoftwarewebjavascriptapishttps://martyw.dev/posts/my-2024-tech-stack/https://martyw.dev/posts/my-2024-tech-stack/What I'm reaching for this year — languages, frameworks, infra — and why.Thu, 07 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMTsoftwarewebmetatoolshttps://martyw.dev/posts/javascript-game-development-engine-ideas/https://martyw.dev/posts/javascript-game-development-engine-ideas/Where the JavaScript game-engine landscape has gaps, and how I'd fill them if I built one.Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMTsoftwaregamingjavascriptwebhttps://martyw.dev/posts/thoughts-on-graphql-after-2-years/https://martyw.dev/posts/thoughts-on-graphql-after-2-years/What two years of running a production GraphQL service taught me about where it earns its keep and where it doesn't.Mon, 21 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMTsoftwaregraphqlwebapis