Blogs
Write-ups of things I broke, measured, or shipped: systems, infrastructure, and whatever I'm figuring out.
11 posts browse 44 topics rss
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NAT bought us IPv4. It made real-time audio weird.
NAT let the internet outgrow its public IPv4 address supply. It also made a connected VoIP call a surprisingly different problem from a working one.
8 min
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The account was the hard part
x402, Cloudflare Wallets and cloudflare.pay are usually described as giving AI agents a wallet. What they actually do is take apart the account: the thing that fuses who you are, what you're allowed to use, and how you pay into one long-lived, human-shaped object.
12 min
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The phone number was flagged before we ever used it
Recycled phone numbers carry the previous owner's spam reputation. We linked out to Truecaller instead of showing our own guess, which meant reverse-engineering an undocumented Android deep link with adb.
2 min
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The slow page wasn't the database
A dashboard page was slow to load, so everyone reached for the database. The real cost was the code drawing one dropdown 400 times. A story about N+1 queries and the fix that took them from 400 to 4.
3 min
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You can't un-bounce an email
An AWS suspension taught me that email deliverability is a reputation system. Here is what actually moves it: bounce thresholds, the hard ceiling on address verification, and why clean lists still land in spam.
4 min
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Extending Uptime Kuma: 90-day heartbeats, a Slack command, and shipping a fork
Getting an unmerged feature into production, adding a Slack /incident command, and open-sourcing the result as a clean fork.
1 min
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Driving a whole voice-AI platform from a single prompt
Building OmniDimension's MCP integration layer: two services, 49 tools, an OAuth 2.1 server, shipped to npm and live in production.
1 min
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Our computers don't really know what time it is
A trip down the rabbit hole of quartz crystals, cesium atoms, GPS, NTP, and PTP, after chrony told me my clock was running slow.
2 min
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What actually makes an AI agent "agentic"
Agentic AI is the same LLM wired into a loop: plan, act, observe, repeat, until a goal is met instead of answered in one reply.
2 min
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A backend take-home, and the two bugs that taught me more than the task
A FastAPI service that stores stock prices, serves them over a REST API, and backtests a moving-average crossover strategy, containerized end to end. Two bugs taught me more than the assignment did.
2 min