Machine Learning
5 min read
K-Means vs. DBSCAN vs. Hierarchical: Which Clustering Algorithm to Actually Reach For
I once spent two days convinced a customer dataset had exactly four segments, because K-Means told me so.
Web Scraping
10 min read
Residential Proxies for Web Scraping: What You're Actually Paying For
I spent $400 on residential proxies before I understood what I was buying. The site I was scraping — a mid-size retailer's product catalog, nothing exotic — kept throwing 403s at me, and every forum…
Javascript
6 min read
PDF-lib for Browser PDF Manipulation: The Library I Reach For When I Don't Want a Backend
A client once asked me to add a confidentiality footer and page numbers to every PDF a small law office sent out. Maybe forty documents a week.
Gcp
6 min read
Hybrid Cloud Architecture vs. GCP Security: Do You Really Have to Choose?
Here is the question I have watched platform engineers circle for years, usually around month four of a migration, usually at 11pm in a thread with the security team: can I run a Hybrid Cloud…
Backend
6 min read
Lesson Six: The REST API You Built Isn't Done Until You've Tested It Three Ways
The first time I shipped a bug into a REST API I had "fully tested," I had 38 passing tests and a green checkmark I was honestly a little proud of.
Ai
5 min read
Lesson Six: The AI Infrastructure Investment Everyone Names Is the One Doing the Least Work
A few months ago I counted. Across the AI coverage that landed in my feed over one week — newsletters, broker notes, two podcasts, a magazine cover — a single chip-design company was named ninety-one…
Backend
5 min read
The Sixth Lesson About Full-Stack Development: The 3-Endpoint Rule That Got Me Unstuck
You've been told you need six months of LeetCode before you're allowed to look at a backend. I want to talk about a smaller number that did more for me than any of that: three. Three endpoints.
Machine Learning
9 min read
Web AI vs. the Server: Where Browser-Based Machine Learning Actually Earns Its Keep
I shipped a feature last year that classified uploaded images — is this a receipt, a screenshot, or a photo of a person — for about 11,000 users in its first month.
Architecture
6 min read
Software Architecture Patterns: The Lesson Nobody Taught You About Why They Exist
The first time I sat in an architecture discussion at a real job, I understood about 30 percent of it. I want to be precise about that number, because it is the whole point of this piece.
Dart
11 min read
Error Handling in Dart: How a 47-Line Try/Catch Taught Me to Stop Trusting Exceptions
The catch block was 47 lines long. I counted them twice, the way you count stairs in the dark when you already know you've missed the bottom one.