notes from a working engineer
// backend systems, self-hosting, hardware, and the engineering craft that doesn't go out of date
900 randomly mixed glass marbles, six independent sorters, and a sunset that assembles itself in real time. The mechanism, the dozen ways it jammed, the Vulkan path tracer, and the GPU you actually need to render it.
Read more →Our Datadog bill hit $9,400 in a month where nothing unusual happened. Here's the full breakdown of what we were paying for, the self-hosted stack we moved to, and what it actually costs now.
Read more →A full parts list, prices, and the three things that actually made this six-bay build quiet — plus what I'd change if I built it again.
Read more →CPU, disk, and network benchmarks across five providers at the same price point, plus support response times and which one I'd actually recommend.
Read more →A plain-language guide to linear, tactile, and clicky switches, what actuation force and travel distance actually mean, and a few switches worth trying first.
Read more →Five years of notes, three folder structures that failed, and the one habit that mattered more than any app choice.
Read more →A daylight-saving-time bug made every scheduled job in our fleet run twice. Here's the full timeline, the root cause, and why idempotency saved us from a much worse write-up.
Read more →Where cron actually came from, how its crontab syntax ended up the way it is, and why a utility from 1970s Unix still runs most of the internet's scheduled work.
Read more →A practical method for reading internet RFCs without drowning in them: what to skip, what to read closely, and how to tell a load-bearing RFC from a historical curiosity.
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