Articles on technology, building, making, coding, art, design, and other topics.
AI
Building a LinkedIn ML Persona: Part 1 - The Data Harvest
LinkedIn is using your data to train their AI. I decided to beat them to it. Here is how I used synthetic data generation to train a Llama 3.2 ML model on my own professional persona for pennies.
Cursor's "Trust Me Bro" Vibes, Backed by RL Isn't Quite There Yet
Cursor 2.0's Composer model uses RL to navigate codebases at unprecedented speed. But what it hasn't done, learning from your actual codebase with feedback loops, reveals the real challenge ahead.
Amazon's AI Gamble: The Real Cost of Panic Investing
Amazon just announced its largest layoffs ever: 30,000 people, all while pouring billions into AI infrastructure. This isn't transformation, it's panic disguised as strategy.
Real-Time Geometric Rendering of Web Page Architecture
A technical implementation of canvas-based DOM structure visualization that reveals interactive elements through coordinate translation and hardware-accelerated rendering.
Spotify for the Mall: FYE's listening kiosk in 2005
Before smartphones put the world's music in our pockets, we built a "Spotify for the Mall" a touch-screen listening station for FYE stores, running on embedded Windows CE with a custom architecture.
Long before React, Redux, or even JSON became industry standards, we built a full-featured music streaming and download application inside IE6. This is the story of MusicNet Performer and the "SPA" architecture we invented to make it work.
Working on large-scale platforms taught me the value of pristine engineering. But those same principles that work for enterprise platforms can kill early-stage companies.
Understanding does not come from explaining, it comes from engaging with concepts we can relate to. A story about teaching fractions and decimals that reveals fundamental truths about UX design.
Designing an adequate user experience is easy. Designing a beautifully effective UX that meets all business requirements and is effortless to use is incredibly hard. The solution lies in understanding how our brains process patterns.
A screensaver that gathers mouse-clicks from across the web and renders them as fingerprints on your screen, creating a visual record of missed human contact.
The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium precisely because it has no content. A collection of projects that refuse to take the mechanisms of the lightbulb and lightswitch for granted.
An investigation into digital communication consisting of a computer connected to 101 keys distributed throughout a building via 700 meters of wire, exploring the impracticalities of communication.
