writing9 posts
Tools, compute, and the architectures behind them.
Comparisons run first-hand: what a free tier actually gives you, what the paid tier costs, and the point where each option stops being the right call. Every price is dated, because prices go stale.
compute
Nine ways to work on files that live on another machine, ranked by small-file cost
Measured on a 68 ms link: an sshfs read of one 13 KB file costs 372 ms, and 200 of them cost 74 seconds. Nine options, ordered by what they do about that.
07 Sept 2026 / 8 min read / checked 2026-09-07
devtools
Six secret scanners against sixteen planted credentials, and what each one walked past
I hid sixteen fake credentials in a git repo across seven kinds of hiding place, ran six open-source scanners, and counted. All six missed the same one.
06 Sept 2026 / 8 min read / checked 2026-09-06
ai-architecture
Uber's agent stack taken apart, and the part its write-up leaves out
Uber published the gateway, the token service and the MCP layer. It never published what happens when a model dies mid-request, which is the part that broke my own cascade three times.
05 Sept 2026 / 9 min read / checked 2026-09-05
devtools
Seven self-hosted AI agents, with the numbers pulled from the API not the blog posts
Every comparison article I found was stale by more than a hundred thousand stars. Here are the seven, ranked on what the repository itself says about them today.
05 Sept 2026 / 8 min read / checked 2026-09-05
ai-architecture
Six vector stores, compared on how many vectors the free tier really holds
Every one of these advertises its free tier in gigabytes. Nobody embeds gigabytes. Converted into vectors at a common dimension, the gap between the most and least generous is about forty times.
05 Sept 2026 / 9 min read / checked 2026-09-05
compute
Five hosts for a small site, compared on the limit that stops you first
None of these run out of bandwidth. They stop on a build quota, a plan migration you cannot undo, a Git permission, or a clause saying your site is the wrong kind of site.
05 Sept 2026 / 8 min read / checked 2026-09-05
practices
Six ways a deploy goes green while the old code keeps serving
Every one of these reports success somewhere and failure nowhere. The pattern is the same: the signal you are watching is upstream of the thing you actually care about.
05 Sept 2026 / 7 min read / checked 2026-09-05
ai-architecture
Six ways to reach Postgres from a serverless function, ranked by what breaks first
The connection string the dashboard hands you is the one most likely to fail from a serverless host. Here is what each route actually does, and the error you get when it is the wrong one.
05 Sept 2026 / 8 min read / checked 2026-09-05
devtools
Eight uptime monitors compared on catching a 200 that is lying
A serverless function that was never deployed answered 200 with the app shell. Here is what each free tier lets you assert on the response body, and what the first paid dollar actually buys.
05 Sept 2026 / 8 min read / checked 2026-09-05