A photography portfolio was sitting at a 6 second LCP on mobile and a 25KB masonry script was doing it. Native CSS masonry does the same job, with an @supports fallback to columns for the browsers that are not there yet.
A weather dashboard that tells people what to wear, built on Databricks and GPT-4o-mini instead of a pile of if-statements. Covers the extraction class, the LLM transformation step, and the hourly job that keeps the Delta Table fresh.
An AI engineer wires up models that already exist. A machine learning engineer builds the model. Which one you hire decides whether you ship in two weeks or spend six months in a sandbox, and here is how I tell the two jobs apart.
The RTX 30-series has no hardware FP8, so I packed four FP8 values into one FP32 container and unpacked them inside a Triton kernel. On a client’s 3080s that cut the memory bottleneck and ran about 3.3x faster.
A price tracker taught me that a hand-built Google scraper dies within two days. Here is why I hand that job to SerpApi now, plus the PHP wrapper I reuse and the latency setting that matters at scale.
A hanging WooCommerce checkout on Black Friday taught me that a nicer spinner does not calm anyone down. Notes on cognitive tunneling, single-tasking flows, transient locks against panic clicks, and what an emergency mode looks like.
Seven avatars from one SVG symbol, each with its own animation. The CSS cascade dies at the Shadow DOM, but custom properties pass straight through it, which is how one symbol ends up blinking and tapping at a different rate per instance.
A client dropped 8MB 4K PNGs into the media library for holiday backgrounds and the LCP went red within the hour. Here is what fixed it: a 200KB cap on hero images, one file per breakpoint, and WebP.
A fleet dashboard flashed so hard that a broken-down truck went unnoticed for twenty minutes. Faster polling made it worse. What helped: delta indicators, sparklines, skeleton screens, an honest last-sync label and ARIA live regions.
Trimming a legacy site cut page weights by 80%, and the same work cut its energy use. Five steps: pick one journey, benchmark it, set a page weight target, strip the WordPress junk nobody needs, then keep checking.