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How I spent a weekend reinventing a 50-cent chip
An optocoupler is a part I’d seen in schematics for a while and quietly skipped over. There’s an LED pointed at a photo-sensitive transistor with a dashed line between them. The dashed line is the entire point: the two halves of the part are not electrically connected. The signal crosses as light, over a few hundred microns
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DIY Bluetooth Kobo page-turner remote with ESP32 and Lilka
If you’ve ever read an e-book with your hands tucked under a cozy blanket: apparently there are page-turner remotes just for that. And in this post, we’ll DIY it with an ESP32-based device called Lilka.
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A minimal LLM Ops stack with tracing and model costs
I built a minimal FastAPI “customer support reply drafter” with TF-IDF retrieval and Langfuse tracing. You’ll see exactly what context the model used, where latency came from, and what each request cost, plus the trade-offs behind the design.
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RAG: A (mostly) no-buzzword explanation
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a pattern that fixes the knowledge cutoff and hallucination problems by giving an LLM access to the right data at answer time. Instead of asking the model to “remember everything”, RAG lets it look things up first, then answer.
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Unikernels, without the marketing
It all started when I saw Prisma put “serverless” and “no cold starts” in the same sentence describing their “Prisma Postgres” product 🤔
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Solving the Openfire Lab Blue team challenge
As a cybersecurity analyst, you are tasked with investigating a data breach targeting your organization’s Openfire messaging server. Attackers have exploited a vulnerability in the server, compromising sensitive communications and potentially exposing critical data.