ENGINEERING NOTES
THINGS WE BUILT.
THINGS WE BROKE.
THINGS WE LEARNED.
Engineering a Smart Home Monitoring System
When there isn't an off-the-shelf sensor/automation product that fits, the alternative is custom hardware/software integration — built to the actual requirement.
Engineering a PLC Control System
Translating sensors and actuators into reliable control logic — scan cycles, structured text, and why industrial code is written differently.
Running Local LLM Infrastructure
What changes when inference moves off a hosted API and onto GPUs you control — model serving, memory budgeting and the operational tradeoffs.
Building Autonomous Development Loops
Specification-driven, self-correcting engineering: how a loop that inspects, implements, tests and fixes itself is structured — and why it needs a spec, not a prompt.
Building a Reverse Proxy From Scratch
What nginx and Envoy are actually doing under their config files — routing, connection handling and failure modes, implemented directly.
Writing a Linux Character Driver
A field guide to the character-device interface: registering a device, wiring up file_operations, and talking to it from userspace.