The engineering digest.

I built a tiny neural audio codec. Then I listened to the results.

A trained nonlinear encoder, vector-quantized codebook and decoder are interesting. An idealized low bitrate is not the same thing as good reconstructed speech.

Audio ML engineering: what the numbers actually mean

I built five small speech and audio implementations and measured their behavior. ASR errors, turn detection, codecs, prosody and classifier ablations each have different ways to mislead you.

Mobile voice agents: keep the backend in charge

How I connected Swift and Kotlin clients to agent workflows, built Core ML and TensorFlow Lite integration boundaries, and kept authorization on the backend.

Voice agents are distributed systems with microphones

Building an agent that talks is the easy demo. The harder work is authenticated tools, retries, evaluation, telemetry, CRM synchronization and the people who have to operate it.

Retry storms: when resilience multiplies a failure

Retry logic looks harmless in isolation. When a gateway, application service and SDK each apply their own retry policy, a single failed operation can multiply into a dependency outage. That interaction is the starting point for my retry-storm analysis.

AEAD design review: ciphertext still needs an identity and context

An encrypted database value can be perfectly unreadable to an attacker and still end up in the wrong record. If a service moves ciphertext between tenants without binding the record's context, the system may de

ROS 2 node lifecycles: when a robot is allowed to become active

When a robotics node starts, I don't want "the process launched" to be confused with "the robot is ready to move." The ROS 2 managed-node design makes this difference explicit with lifecycle states. That's a be

Stuxnet: malware crossed from Windows into industrial control

I traced Stuxnet as a boundary-crossing problem: from Windows software into industrial control commands. Calling it sophisticated Windows malware misses the physical-system risk. The attack path targeted software used to supervise and program indust

2026-11-05

Measured accessibility after the entrance animation settles

The fade-in reduced effective text contrast while an automated accessibility scan sampled the middle of the transition. The steady-state contrast test now waits until animations complete; a separate test checks reduced-motion behavior.

2026-11-05

Added lightweight motion without a new runtime

Implemented CSS-only page entrances, hover treatments for cards and social icons, logo motion, and accessible reduced-motion handling.

2026-11-05

Changed Contact from business intake to a personal hello

Replaced the project-qualification form with optional name and subject, a message, and an email draft generated locally. Added strict HTTPS/domain validation for owner-provided public profile/invite links.

2026-11-05

Made Life a focused home for eight interests

Grouped hiking, cooking, robotics, IoT, mobile engineering, technology and travel under Life. Combined social identities in one place.

2026-11-05

Closed a hydration race in the browser labs

Disabled user controls until hydration and URL-scenario restoration finish. Verified that stateful lab controls work after a production static export, not just inside the development server.