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Teaching a Neural Network to Play Captains Mode
I wanted to know which Dota 2 hero to pick during drafting. The answer involved 200,000 matches, a Transformer, and a surprisingly deep dive into what it means to "know" a hero exists.
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Fighting the IPv4 Tax with a CDN Side-Quest
The story of how a friend's connection issue led me down a rabbit hole of network architecture, culminating in a creative (and free) solution to support legacy IPv4 users without paying the new IPv4 tax.
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Teaching My Wardrobe Some Style
For years, my custom-built wardrobe app was a silent, meticulously organized vault of my clothing. It knew what I owned, but not how I thought. After a month-long deep dive, I've finally given it a brain
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How Hard Can It Be To Paste Text To Yourself?
I was tired of emailing files to myself, so I built a simple replacement in a weekend. As usual, prototyping is fast but building a truly polished application takes attention to detail and relentlessly high standards.
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My Cloud Server Has a Secret Friend in My Closet
The story of how I hit a resource wall on my personal cloud server, rejected the boring and expensive scaling solutions, and built a hybrid solution in my closet
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The Guard Who Locked Himself Out: Breaking a Service-Level Deadlock
The tale of how I accidentally created a perfect, inescapable circular dependency between my authentication and metrics services, and the "Aha!" moment that finally broke the loop.
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The Mystery of the Missing Elephants
When a card in my new analyzer had a high score but vanished from the recommendation list, I began an investigation to solve a seemingly impossible paradox. This is the detective story of how I solved the mystery of the missing elephants.
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I Over-Engineered My Magic: The Gathering Cube, and It Was Glorious
The story of how I replaced my manual Magic: The Gathering cube curation with a custom-built web application, learning critical lessons about data, performance, and why the absence of a price can sometimes mean "infinitely expensive."