Software
Every system I have run at scale has taught me the same lesson in a different costume: failures don't hide in the components you own — they hide in the seams between them. This is the story of one such seam. Our notification pipeline had a monitored backend on
Every RAG tutorial follows almost the same flow: convert the user's query into an embedding, retrieve the Top-K most similar documents, and pass them to the LLM. The part that's usually skipped is a simple question: Why K? Why retrieve 3 documents instead of 1? Why
AI
In the first post in this series we described a rule-based sleep detector for our collar wearable: bucket the IMU stream into one-minute epochs, score each epoch by how much the acceleration is changing, and call a long enough run of quiet minutes a sleep bout. We ended that post
Software
Keyspaces looked like the safe choice. Cassandra was already running in the stack, so letting Temporal reuse it meant no new engine and everything staying in-account. Then we hit the wall: Temporal's Cassandra schema depends on conditional batch writes, the lightweight-transaction mechanism behind shard-ownership fencing, and Keyspaces doesn&
Software
A pipeline written as a script is a promise that nothing will go wrong. Modeling it as a directed acyclic graph is what you do after something does. Every multi-step pipeline starts as a function. Fetch the data, clean it, score it, summarize it, store the result, notify someone. Six
Firmware
When a device misbehaves on your bench, you attach a debugger, tail a log, poke at it. When that same device is a smart pet bowl in a stranger's kitchen — one of thousands, behind a home router, with no screen and no one to read a terminal — none
Hardware
How mixed-signal architecture decides whether your product records clean audio or captures the noise of its own electronics In a connected product, audio quality is often judged by the microphone, codec, and software processing algorithm. But many audio failures do not start in the microphone or the codec. They start
AI
At 7:14 this morning, a smart feeding bowl logged something small: Max, a six-year-old golden retriever, left a third of his breakfast. His collar tracker says yesterday's walk was completely normal. A vet note from two weeks ago mentions mild tartar buildup. And a dog-nutrition book on
Product
How aligning mechanical, electrical, and firmware engineering early helped us reduce redesigns, shorten decision cycles, and build a more reliable product. Introduction Most engineering problems don't belong to a single discipline. A mechanical engineer designs a bracket that blocks a connector. An electrical engineer relocates a PCB and
Technology, Insights and Ideas.
Firmware
A camera is the obvious way to know whether a pet is in the room — and often the wrong one. It fails in the dark, it's blocked by a blanket or the side of a bed, and it puts a lens in the most private corners of someone&
Software
Every system I have run at scale has taught me the same lesson in a different costume: failures don't hide in the components you own — they hide in the seams between them. This is the story of one such seam. Our notification pipeline had a monitored backend on
Every RAG tutorial follows almost the same flow: convert the user's query into an embedding, retrieve the Top-K most similar documents, and pass them to the LLM. The part that's usually skipped is a simple question: Why K? Why retrieve 3 documents instead of 1? Why
AI
In the first post in this series we described a rule-based sleep detector for our collar wearable: bucket the IMU stream into one-minute epochs, score each epoch by how much the acceleration is changing, and call a long enough run of quiet minutes a sleep bout. We ended that post
Software
Keyspaces looked like the safe choice. Cassandra was already running in the stack, so letting Temporal reuse it meant no new engine and everything staying in-account. Then we hit the wall: Temporal's Cassandra schema depends on conditional batch writes, the lightweight-transaction mechanism behind shard-ownership fencing, and Keyspaces doesn&
Software
A pipeline written as a script is a promise that nothing will go wrong. Modeling it as a directed acyclic graph is what you do after something does. Every multi-step pipeline starts as a function. Fetch the data, clean it, score it, summarize it, store the result, notify someone. Six
Firmware
When a device misbehaves on your bench, you attach a debugger, tail a log, poke at it. When that same device is a smart pet bowl in a stranger's kitchen — one of thousands, behind a home router, with no screen and no one to read a terminal — none
Hardware
How mixed-signal architecture decides whether your product records clean audio or captures the noise of its own electronics In a connected product, audio quality is often judged by the microphone, codec, and software processing algorithm. But many audio failures do not start in the microphone or the codec. They start
AI
At 7:14 this morning, a smart feeding bowl logged something small: Max, a six-year-old golden retriever, left a third of his breakfast. His collar tracker says yesterday's walk was completely normal. A vet note from two weeks ago mentions mild tartar buildup. And a dog-nutrition book on
Product
How aligning mechanical, electrical, and firmware engineering early helped us reduce redesigns, shorten decision cycles, and build a more reliable product. Introduction Most engineering problems don't belong to a single discipline. A mechanical engineer designs a bracket that blocks a connector. An electrical engineer relocates a PCB and