Case studies.
Long-form write-ups once the work is done: the problem, the wrong turns, the fix, and what it taught me.
Nine Copies of Every Write
My Kubernetes control plane had been running five times slower than etcd considers healthy for over a year. I spent two hours blaming Ceph recovery throttles, caused an outage proving it, and then found…
Agents & AIThe Question That Vanished, and the Fix That Was Almost Right
A self-hosted AI agent crashed with "no user query found in messages" — on a request that demonstrably contained a user query. The cause was an upstream renderer that validates messages after the server…
Agents & AI · Cloud & InfrastructureTwo Cards, One Model, and the Ethernet Between Them
Pooling two Tesla T40s under llama.cpp's RPC backend bought a quarter-million-token context window on hardware I own — and cost half the generation speed, because every single token had to round-trip over plain TCP…
Agents & AI · Security, Data & RecoveryTurning a Document Archive into a Tool an AI Agent Can Use, Safely
A self-hosted document archive holds years of receipts, statements, and scans — useless to an AI assistant unless it can be reached safely from the outside. The build: an OAuth-gated bridge that took a…
Agents & AIA Local Voice Agent, and the Two Weeks It Took to Make It Fast
Getting a self-hosted AI agent to hold a real-time voice conversation over Discord — on our own GPUs, with nothing leaving the network — turned into a two-week latency hunt through cold GPU handles,…
Cloud & InfrastructureThe Felt Experience of a Well-Tuned Network
Most networks are utilities. A few are tools. The difference is whether you can feel the friction every time information passes through. You spend eight hours a day inside your network. More, if you…
Agents & AI · AppsAgentic Web Scraping with Browser Automation
The Challenge I went into this project wanting to build an agentic agent that could scrape the web and populate web application forms with information. Traditionally, building a scraping agent is stopped by the…
Cloud & InfrastructureResearch Lab Infrastructure Modernization
Executive Summary Faced with 10‑year‑old Ivy Bridge servers, fragmented GPUs, and mounting energy bills, the lab launched a six‑month modernization from January to June 2025. The goals were to: Key results: Key metric Early 2025 June 2025 Δ Idle rack draw…
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