Notes from the trenches: AI infrastructure, engineering, and what we're building

The Backup System That Took Down the Database It Was Backing Up

A production Postgres box in a crash-restart loop, reported as "the database is maxed out." It was sitting at 9 of 100 connections. The real cause was one character of difference in a filesystem path.

Running Your Own Kubernetes: What Managed Clusters Were Quietly Doing for You

We moved a multi-market platform off GKE Autopilot onto self-managed k3s. The cluster came up in ten minutes. The interesting part was the inventory of things Autopilot had been doing that we suddenly owned.

Cross-Cloud MySQL Replication, and the Write-Ownership Rule That Keeps It Alive

A managed MySQL primary in one cloud, a self-managed replica in another, replicating over the public internet at zero seconds of lag. The replication was the easy part. Deciding who owns each table was not.

Self-Hosting Qwen3.8-27B: Frontier Multimodal AI on a $0.79/hr GPU

How we put a 27B vision-language reasoning model behind our own OpenAI-compatible endpoint with vLLM and a single rented L40S — and the five gotchas that cost us an afternoon.

From Nine Minutes to Ten Seconds: A Warm Server for LTX-2.5 Video Generation

Open-weights video models pay a brutal cold-start tax — ~67 GB of weights loaded on every CLI run. We built a warm HTTP server around LTX-2.5 that keeps everything resident, and generation dropped from minutes to seconds.