Engineering notes, delivery stories, and practical lessons from data platform work.
The backend behind a self-hosted video compression service: turning "compress this video" into an Airflow DAG, isolating workloads with per-tier Celery queues, and picking FFmpeg settings that actually shrink the file.
Read postsqueezeVid is a Django app for compressing videos. Most of it is unremarkable CRUD, but two parts had to be exactly right: spending paid quota exactly once, and talking reliably to a flaky external processing service.
Read postI built s3Administrator to manage S3 buckets the way I manage local files - without handing my credentials to a web dashboard. It's an open-source Electron app with no account, no cloud, and no telemetry.
Read postMy portfolio's chatbot answers questions about me, and the interesting part is the retrieval layer that decides what the model is allowed to know. I built it on Postgres with pgvector, inside Django.
Read postFive of my side projects - including this site - run on a single old MacBook at home, behind one Cloudflare Tunnel with no open ports. Here's the architecture and why I moved everything off cloud VMs.
Read postIn this post, I detail my experience migrating a critical order service at Trustedshops using Terraform, ensuring zero downtime while consolidating resources across AWS accounts.
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