Notes on building
systems that last.
Case studies and field notes on billing, backend architecture, migrations and FinOps.
Closing the gap to llama.cpp on a desk-side GB10 — six Atlas iterations, measured
Serving Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on the Atlas engine: per iteration the analysis, the decisions, the tower-defense benchmark and the defects — 15 → 21.6 tok/s against llama.cpp's 24–25, every engine change proven bit-exact.
Benchmarking agentic flows on a desk-side GB10 — from model funnel to a shipped PR
Three research rounds over real codebases, verification-first grading, an orchestrated harness — and four fixes landing upstream on the Atlas inference engine.
Benchmarking local models by making them ship — a tower-defense build-off
Prod 27B vs Qwen3.8-Flash-Next quants: one complete HTML5 game each from identical prompts — speed, prefill, craft, and the playable results.
A temporal EAV entity store in Postgres — Part 5: Maintenance and migration
Living with it: pg_stat metrics per table, invariant queries on patrol, Prometheus alerts, and entity migrations for a schema with no DDL.
A temporal EAV entity store in Postgres — Part 4: E2E testing
The suite as the executable specification: three assertion altitudes, the behavior matrix as a test plan, and rollbacks proven at the row level.
A temporal EAV entity store in Postgres — Part 3: Services and the API edge
Where business meaning lives: cross-entity transactions, the validation ladder, and time-travel as a query parameter.
A temporal EAV entity store in Postgres — Part 2: The abstract repository
The implementation layer: the stack, the minimal fields and methods, and what a concrete domain type actually has to write.
A temporal EAV entity store in Postgres — Part 1: Storage concept
One schema, a dozen domain types — the patterns, the field-update behavior matrix, the fetching SQL and the caveats.
A startup's global network on AWS — Transit Gateway planning and the perimeter
One CIDR plan, a Transit Gateway star with route tables as security zones, and three VPN doors as the whole human perimeter.
One Helm chart, every environment — ArgoCD and ephemeral envs included
The chart as a resource compiler: catalog + manifest values, chart + values = ArgoCD app, and ticket environments that cost one file.
DevOps for a SOC 2 audit — Part 1: Docker as an evidence factory
Every control a build stage, every result an artifact — evidence generated per commit, exported to static analysis and vulnerability assessment.
Terraform on AWS — the watchtower: cloud state, locks, and the deploy role
One bootstrap stack owns state, locks and deploy roles — collisions become structurally impossible and nobody holds admin keys.