Dispatches from the work in progress
Our pet-health assistant streams its answers token by token. Under load, something odd showed up: response times for completely unrelated endpoints climbed in lockstep with how many people were mid-conversation. History reads, a settings fetch, a suggestion request. CPU sat close to idle. Nothing was throttled, nothing was retrying, no
We removed a cache last week to fix a stale-data bug, and the actual result was discovering that one of our endpoints had been taking two seconds for months. Nobody had filed a ticket about it. Nobody knew. The cache had been quietly absorbing it the entire time, and it
What happened when we made a physical transducer and a call to a language model the same kind of object - one manifest, one reading envelope, one store, and four guards that run at every boot.
A smart bowl reading looks like this: 120 g served, 82 g eaten, 340 seconds, 7:14 a.m. It is perfectly precise and almost meaningless on its own. A vet note is the opposite: rich with meaning ("mild tartar, monitor appetite"), structured not at all. To answer
A smart pet bowl runs real neural networks. It segments the animal in a camera frame, reads a temperature at the right point on its body, and classifies the sounds of eating and barking. That means a full deep-learning runtime has to live on the device — not a toy inference
A redundant power input is one of those features that looks finished the moment the second connector lands on the board. Two sources, one rail, a pair of diodes. It powers up. It passes review. Then a unit in the field runs for four months on its backup pack because
How thoughtful choices in color, material, finish, and light shaped Everbowl's identity long before its technology came to life. Introduction When people pick up a product for the first time, they don't start by evaluating its spec sheet. They make an almost instant judgment based on
Rebooting a device sounds harmless until you remember what it's for. When a pet-monitoring station restarts, it isn't watching anything — no weight readings, no captures, no heartbeat. A safe operating-system update costs a reboot, and a reboot costs a small hole in a pet's
Every site running paid ads eventually installs the same piece of code: a small JavaScript snippet from an ad platform that reports back when something worth knowing happens, a page loaded, a form got submitted. It's usually a few lines, it's usually copy-pasted from a setup
While working on SEO improvements for our website, I recently came across something that caught my attention spam alerts and suspicious backlinks pointing to the website. Until then, most of my SEO work had been around things like indexing, page performance, metadata, and improving the overall website experience. This task
Most monitoring conversations are about thresholds and routing - how many failures before we restart something, how long before we page someone, who gets woken up at 3am. That's real work. But it quietly assumes something worth verifying: that the signal you're measuring actually means what
Building products that protect themselves without turning every fault into a service nightmare A hardware protection circuit is usually designed with one question in mind: "How do we prevent this fault from damaging the board?" That question is important, but in real products it is incomplete. A product
Somewhere in most mature codebases there are three ways to schedule a recurring job. Nobody chose that. There is no design document proposing three schedulers, no meeting where a team weighed the options and landed on "several." Look closely and each one had a good reason at the
Our IMU bark classifier now has 11 training generations behind it. This post covers what changed between v8 (our last reported state) and v11 (live as of August 5), introduces a real ambient audio clip where the audio classifier was completely fooled but the IMU was not, and explains the
How our "Stage 2.5" design freeze helped eliminate scope creep while keeping Everbowl moving toward production. Introduction Every hardware team eventually has to answer a hard question: are we done designing? The temptation is always one more improvement. A bracket that could be a little stronger. A
