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Post-mortem, 2025 Edition Table of Contents 1. Travel 2. Work 3. Learning 4. Life Damascus, Jan 2025. Another year, another performance review season to procrastinate on. I felt like I largely locked in this year on work, so the scorecard is: 1. Travel In January I went to Syria , spending about a month there and bopping around Sayyida Zaineb. The experience was incredible, especially only a mo....
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Dilettantes and Polymaths this post is far more rambling than my regular ones It's been a year. Normally I'd write up something wrapping up about my goals and how far I accomplished, but I think for me this year was one long lesson in understanding the difference between being a dilettante and a polymath. I've always been terrified of being a dilettante, mostly because it creates some sort of "crank" identity, such as the weirdo....
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Fieldnotes Table of Contents 1. Central America 2. South America 3. Middle East and North Africa Midnight volleyball in Fort Washington Park, 2021. Some fieldnotes from various places I've lived in. I usually will write up a section for any country I've lived for more than a month in. 1. Central America El Salvador 2. South America Uruguay Argentina 3. Middle East and Nor..
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Pret's Fruit Cup I prod the strawberry with my fork. It's actually half of a strawberry, sliced in twain by some machine at some indeterminate time ago. The plastic cup it came in promised "organic" and "fresh daily", although I figure companies like Pret probably have redefined "daily" in terms of elephant years or something. The bottom tip of the strawberry's red flesh is a bit mushy, but also sweeter than the rest of it. I pause, brief....
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Read the Damn Error Message Table of Contents 1. Example 1.1. Tracebacks is a structured logs 1.2. Read the actual error 1.3. Check the filenames, switch the reading order 1.4. Print it (or use pdb) 2. Debugging Mentality I've been working on a project for grad school, and through watching my teammates, I've seen them exhibit some of the same behaviors I see juniors do. The most frustrating one is the inability to....
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Shrines Table of Contents 1. Locations: 1. Locations: Photographs of various shrines I've seen. A shrine here is basically anything I consider to have spiritual significance. < 2021:07:21 09:55:40 > - < 36.7586833333333, 43.8936416666667 > < 2021:07:21 11:25:05 > - < 36.7682833333333, 43.8941166666667 > < 2025:05:04 09:07:04 > - < 36.7849083333333, 3.06117222222222 > < 2019:07:05 16:42:0....
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El Salvador Table of Contents 1. Fiestas de Agosto 1.1. Mass on the 6th 2. Romero 3. Misc 4. Wrap I just came back from three weeks in El Salvador. You land to a giant sign that says "El Salvador, the Land of Smiles," which might be a stretch. Summer means rain most afternoons; thunderstorms drift through most evenings for an hour or two. I spent three weeks in the city for the Fiestas de Agosto and San ....
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Here’s another of my n8n useful workflows. I built it to receive a daily email with the top 20 Hacker News posts, each accompanied by a short summary generated by ChatGPT. You can choose how many posts include and how long and detailed the summary should be. Yes, I know there are many online services that do the same thing and send daily newsletters, but this workflow allows me to decide exactly when to receive the emails during the day, ..
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Here’s another of my n8n useful workflows. I built it to receive a daily email with the top 20 Hacker News posts, each accompanied by a short summary generated by ChatGPT. You can choose how many posts include and how long and detailed the summary should be. Yes, I know there are many online services that do the same thing and send daily newsletters, but this workflow allows me to decide exactly when to receive the emails during the day, ..
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Picture this: It’s January. Your breath fogs the air, your toes ache from the cold, and you’re scrolling through photos of turquoise water and sunlit beaches. If you’ve ever felt trapped by winter’s grip, you’re not alone. The good news? There are warm destinations in January that feel like a secret handshake for sun-seekers. Let’s […] The post Warm Destinations in January: Discover Your Perfect Escape appeared first on Intentmedia .
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An infinite-canvas moodboard with sticky notes and images. Pan, zoom, drop things wherever they make sense.
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An infinite-canvas moodboard with sticky notes and images. Pan, zoom, drop things wherever they make sense.
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I've created the
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I've been exploring how to integrate advanced AI agents into my daily workflow, and email remains the most universal interface for asynchronous tasks. I built a "Deep Research" agent using Val Town that allows me to trigger complex research tasks simply by sending an email. It uses Google's Deep Research model to perform the heavy lifting. It is pretty simple to get started, you just need to send an email.
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I've created the
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I've been exploring how to integrate advanced AI agents into my daily workflow, and email remains the most universal interface for asynchronous tasks. I built a "Deep Research" agent using Val Town that allows me to trigger complex research tasks simply by sending an email. It uses Google's Deep Research model to perform the heavy lifting. It is pretty simple to get started, you just need to send an email.
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Why yearly themes are better than resolutions, plus how mine went and what else I'm covering soon. Read the whole thing .
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Why yearly themes are better than resolutions, plus how mine went and what else I'm covering soon. Read the whole thing .
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AWS Cost Optimization Case Study: How I Cut a Client's Bill by 50%
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muhammadraza.me
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5 months ago
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eng
Last month, a client’s AWS bill hit $5,000 — up 40% from last year with no clear explanation. After one week of systematic analysis, I cut it to $2,500/month — a 50% reduction, saving them $30,000 annually . Here’s exactly how I did it, with the scripts you can use. The Discovery Phase: How I Found the Problems Before touching anything, I needed to understand the infrastructure. Here’s my systematic approach: Step 1: Pull Cost Data ....
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The two fun problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. Today I want to talk about the first one. I've been working on Epithet , an SSH certificate authority Really, an agent, a CA, and policy server that makes certificate-based authentication easy. Part of the system involves a "discovery" endpoint where clients learn which hosts the CA handles. The question: how do you cache this efficiently ....
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The two fun problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. Today I want to talk about the first one. I've been working on Epithet , an SSH certificate authority Really, an agent, a CA, and policy server that makes certificate-based authentication easy. Part of the system involves a "discovery" endpoint where clients learn which hosts the CA handles. The question: how do you cache this efficiently ....
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AWS Cost Optimization Case Study: How I Cut a Client's Bill by 50%
-
muhammadraza.me
-
5 months ago
-
eng
Last month, a client’s AWS bill hit $5,000 — up 40% from last year with no clear explanation. After one week of systematic analysis, I cut it to $2,500/month — a 50% reduction, saving them $30,000 annually . Here’s exactly how I did it, with the scripts you can use. The Discovery Phase: How I Found the Problems Before touching anything, I needed to understand the infrastructure. Here’s my systematic approach: Step 1: Pull Cost Data ....
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Why? - Web browsers have become far too complicated. The difficulty of implementing a sufficiently feature complete browser for daily use, is nearly insurmountable. They are also far too resource demanding. Problems with the existing alternative - Gemini has superseded Gopher, making the latter not even worth talking about. Gemini limits its use case to document sharing, the original intention for the WWW. However, its document format ....
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My PCP air rifle is a Weihrauch HW100 T . The rifle developed a slow leak: I could fill and use it, but over the course of a couple of days any stored pressure would be gone. This was problematic because leaving the gun empty for long periods can allow moisture to find its way into the cylinder. My leak appeared after I'd removed the cylinder for a depressurisation. I refilled it before re-attaching, so the seals will have gone from 1 ....
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In the previous post , I talked about the PropertySphere Telegram bot (you can also watch the full video here ). In this post, I want to show how we can make it even smarter. Take a look at the following chat screenshot: What is actually going on here? This small interaction showcases a numbe r of RavenDB features, all at once. Let’s first focus on how Telegram hands us images. This is done using Photoor Document messages (depending....
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In the previous post , I talked about the PropertySphere Telegram bot (you can also watch the full video here ). In this post, I want to show how we can make it even smarter. Take a look at the following chat screenshot: What is actually going on here? This small interaction showcases a numbe r of RavenDB features, all at once. Let’s first focus on how Telegram hands us images. This is done using Photoor Document messages (depending....
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This fall I collaborated with my friend Brock on a guitar pedal project. It's based on a pedal schematic called "Yet Another Fuzz Face". Brock had done electronics projects but never designed and ordered a custom PCB. So I encouraged him to try inputting his schematic in KiCAD and designing a small circuit board he could mount into his guitar pedal enclosure. There was a pretty steep learning curve for KiCAD but he struggled through it and ..
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My current client has an enterprise CI/CD pipeline that is maintained by a centralized team that does not use it. Its product owner(s) do not rely on its output for their revenue. They are not measured on its performance or reliability. And yet we are obligated to use this pipeline. There’s no other option. We were also handed a microservices architecture from the Architecture team so our application is comprised of about 20 separate serv..
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In Day 7 we built a webhook delivery platform with retry logic, dead letter queues, and circuit breakers. But we glossed over a critical question: what happens when one customer’s misbehaving endpoint starts affecting everyone else? Today we’re diving into the Bulkhead pattern: isolating workloads so failures in one area don’t cascade into others. We’ll apply it to webhook delivery, then extend it to audit log storage and full multi-tenant ..
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My current client has an enterprise CI/CD pipeline that is maintained by a centralized team that does not use it. Its product owner(s) do not rely on its output for their revenue. They are not measured on its performance or reliability. And yet we are obligated to use this pipeline. There’s no other option. We were also handed a microservices architecture from the Architecture team so our application is comprised of about 20 separate serv..
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My current client has an enterprise CI/CD pipeline that is maintained by a centralized team that does not use it. Its product owner(s) do not rely on its output for their revenue. They are not measured on its performance or reliability. And yet we are obligated to use this pipeline. There’s no other option. We were also handed a microservices architecture from the Architecture team so our application is comprised of about 20 separate serv..
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I call it 'Bedtime' The other day I saw a video by someone who bought a $16 electronic clock , and it looked interesting, because that little clock had been taunting me for months by showing up constantly in my AliExpress recommendations. I held off on buying it because what am I going to do with yet another clock , but the video said that it has an ESP8266 inside, and that, with a little soldering and programming, you could run ESPhome....
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