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 3Products I paid for and actually ran, with the price, the limits and the failures
Latest: Seedance 2.5 Hands-On: 725 Credits Buy 27 Seconds, and the CLI Costs Extra
Reality Check
CHECK 4Official numbers cross-checked against independent measurements
Latest: DeepSeek V4 Pro Goes GA: Third-Party Benchmarks Don't Match the Leaked Scorecard
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 27How a system works, explained from zero with diagrams
Latest: Inside Kimi K3's Two Architectural Pillars: KDA and AttnRes, Explained From Zero
Commentary
TAKE 5Where I stand on something, argued from public information rather than measured
Latest: Don't Just Buy Your Engineers AI Tools: The Complete Playbook for Becoming an AI-Native Company
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
0 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.