Field notes on data, AI, infrastructure, and systems that have to survive reality.
I write about data engineering, AI-native tools, local AI, product architecture, and the messy parts of building software: drifting schemas, brittle pipelines, half-useful AI, and systems that looked simple until they met real users.
This site is where I write those things down. Not as polished thought leadership. Not as hype. Mostly as working notes from the field.
Latest posts
- I Tried to Make Structured File Intake Boring
I tested one configuration-driven intake path against clinical-trial, provider-registry, and public-transit files, including bad rows and retries.
- DuckLake on One Machine
I put a small DuckLake, DuckDB, and marimo data platform through one complete job, from 200,000 to 100 million events.
- Five 4K60 Streams Were Fine. The Sixth Was Not.
A paced NVDEC-CUDA-NVENC pipeline found the live-video capacity boundary and showed why a NumPy round trip cost more than the CUDA work.
- The Data Was Already in the Browser
WireData turns JSON responses and page tables into local SQL datasets, but the real design problem was preserving consent, bytes, and lineage.
- The Radio Won't Wait for Your FFT
A paced I/Q replay found where an eight-core SciPy pipeline began missing deadlines and dropping blocks, and how far an RTX GPU moved that boundary.
Start here
New here? These carry the ideas the rest of the site leans on.
- AI Is Good at the Work You Can Check Why the same assistant flies on one project and flails on another — the line is whether a machine can tell when it's wrong.
- Four Results That Looked Better Than They Were The most useful thing I built in a decade of projects: disbelieving an impressive result until something that doesn't care about my feelings confirms it.
- I Sequenced My Family. We Still Don't Have an Answer. A rare-disease hunt across my family, as a data engineer rather than a geneticist — and what the doing taught me, including the part where the mystery held.
- I Built Cellular Routers Every Way. Then I Bought One. Years of building 4G/5G routers from scratch, and why for anything mission-critical I now buy the boring vendor box.
What I write about
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Microsoft Fabric, Azure data platforms, lakehouse design, ETL migrations, data modeling, incremental loads, watermarks, auditability, and the boring control layers that make pipelines reliable.
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How AI fits into real workflows without turning everything into a black box — especially systems where AI assists, but deterministic logic still owns the final action.
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Ollama, OpenWebUI, SearXNG, local models, homelabs, GPUs, self-hosted tools, and the tradeoffs between local control and cloud convenience.
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3D printing, Raspberry Pi, SBCs, OpenWrt, pfSense, Proxmox, Unraid, embedded devices, LTE/5G modules, routers, sensors, and other useful rabbit holes.
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Small tools, solo SaaS ideas, anti-bloat thinking, workflow design, and the line where a useful feature starts turning into a platform.
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Markdown, search, documents, structured notes, versioning, retrieval, and the problem of keeping information useful after the initial excitement wears off.
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Domain-specific systems: recipe versioning, genomics data, smart agriculture, multilingual media, privacy tooling, and other workflows that are really software problems in disguise.
Why this site exists
I use writing to think. Some posts are technical deep dives, some are product notes, some are rough explorations, and some are just me trying to understand where a tool, pattern, or idea breaks.
The common thread is simple: can this system stay useful, understandable, and maintainable after the demo is over? That question shows up everywhere — and it is the backbone of how I think about systems. I've written that up on the philosophy page.
A note on how these are written: I work with AI in the loop — to think through ideas, fact-check specifics, and tidy the prose — then rewrite everything in my own voice. The arguments, the judgment, and the mistakes are mine. Many posts are field notes from real work; where that touches someone else's business, I change the identifying details and keep the shape of what actually happened.