Engineering, explained
as I ship it
Notes from real production work, payments, AI agents, architecture, and why each decision was made.
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Writing
A reader read my benchmark better than I did
I published a fine-tune that beat prompting by 29 points. A commenter said the gap between my two accuracy drops was the real signal. He was right that my table was misleading, wrong about which arm was inflated, and the experiments I ran to check produced a third answer.
Read articleThe client wanted production data in preprod. I said no, then gave them something better.
A reasonable request from a reasonable client: make preprod look like prod, with real data. Why that would have been the worst security decision in the project, how I pushed back without a fight, and the anonymised seed pipeline that made preprod more useful than a copy would have been.
The certificate expired in silence, and the scans never stopped
A renewal cron ran every night for months and never renewed anything, because of one wrong letter. Meanwhile the server took thousands of scans and brute-force attempts a day. Here is what CrowdSec actually blocked, the nginx rules that held, the ports I should never have exposed, and why Cloudflare is the next layer.