Columns
Categories are about subject; columns are about format. Each column is a promise: a hands-on post states what it cost and where it broke, a postmortem names a root cause and a fix, a reality check puts both sets of numbers side by side.
Hands-on Labs
LAB 5Products I paid for and actually ran, with the price, the limits and the failures
Latest: I Self-Hosted MiniMax H3 on an L40S: What Is Actually Open
Reality Check
CHECK 5Official numbers cross-checked against independent measurements
Latest: Prompt Caching (Part 2): Five Vendors, Three Clouds, One Bill
Postmortems
FIX 3A real failure, the experiments that isolated it, the root cause and the fix
Latest: The Mysterious 400 in Claude Multi-Turn Chats: Debugging a Thinking Signature Corruption
Building
BUILD 12Things I actually built with agents, including the steps that did not work
Latest: On the Eve of the Final, I Had fable 5 Run Another Million Simulations: Messi Kicked More Than Half the Gap Away
Explainers
EXPLAIN 29How a system works, explained from zero with diagrams
Latest: Prompt Caching (Part 1): What Is Actually Cached
Commentary
TAKE 6Where I stand on something, argued from public information rather than measured
Latest: I Stopped Chasing New Model Releases. The Hallucinations Didn't Stop.
Read as a set
Two multi-part deep dives you can read start to finish, at your own pace.
VOD Streaming Deep Dive
12 partsA 12-part technical guide to video-on-demand streaming — from raw pixels and codecs to adaptive bitrate, DRM, and building VOD on AWS.
Big Data Deep Dive
10 partsA 10-part series on building a modern data platform on AWS — storage, ingestion, query engines, orchestration, and recommendation systems.
Prompt Caching, End to End
4 partsA four-part series on LLM prompt caching — the mechanism, what the major clouds actually charge, why caches silently miss, and a measured threshold that disagrees with the vendor documentation.