Ambient animations that don’t tank your LCP
A client’s landing page felt dead and my first instinct was to import GSAP. Here is what I did instead: staggered CSS timings on a few SVG groups, transforms only, and a reduced-motion check.
Category: Development
Component variants beat a pile of CSS variables
Twenty near-identical buttons in one design file cost me three hours per border-radius tweak. Component variants in Penpot fixed that, and DTCG tokens made the handoff to CSS boring, which is exactly what you want.
Data storytelling means hiding most of the data
I built a client the dashboard they asked for: 24 SQL queries, three tabs, four seconds slower. They stopped opening it after a week. What worked was cutting every metric that would not change a decision, and burying the data dump in an export tab.
Agentic AI gives you a dot, not an ROC curve
A health-tech client had 99.8% accuracy on a disease that shows up in 0.2% of patients. Their agent said no to everyone. Here is how I pulled a continuous risk score out of a binary agent so the AUC comparison against their XGBoost model meant something.
Native masonry layout in CSS, no JS library
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.
How I built an AI-powered weather pipeline in Databricks
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.
AI engineer vs machine learning engineer: who to hire
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.
Getting software FP8 performance out of RTX 30-series cards
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.
Why I stopped building scrapers for search engine data
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.
Animate SVG symbols with CSS custom properties
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.