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A complete archive of engineering deep-dives, technical explorations, and project post-mortems.

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Showing 42 of 42 articles

Wiring a House by Algorithm: A 3-Phase Panel Optimizer for NF C 15-100

Modelling rooms and sub-panels, auto-generating the tableau électrique, then minimising breaker count and balancing the three phases with a branch-and-bound search.

engineeringside-projects14 min read

Pico Kiln - Part 5: Dropping to the Metal with Rust

Replacing the MicroPython interpreter with a bare-metal, dual-core system that never crashes.

electronicskiln18 min read

A Bank Account for a Smart Contract: Wiring Monerium Into a Self-Custodial Wallet

Why we plugged the wallet straight into a regulated e-money issuer instead of building our own rails, and how the integration actually works: browser-side OAuth2 with PKCE, an nginx proxy that defeats a broken CORS preflight, ERC-1271 address linking, delegated KYC, and a signed SEPA off-ramp

engineeringfrak18 min read

One Translation Source for a Shopify App That Renders in Four Different Runtimes

Why we moved merchant-editable text out of metafields and into a merchant-owned metaobject, how a three-tier Liquid cascade resolves it, and the self-healing sync that never overwrites a merchant's edits

engineeringfrak11 min read

From 9 Minutes to 2: Rebuilding the Wallet's CI on Our Own Platform

Killing Dockerfile.base, sharing cache mounts across six images, and what really moves the needle in Docker build pipelines

devopsfrak17 min read

Bringing CI Back Home: A Hetzner Platform for the Frak Stack

In-cluster GitHub runners, mTLS BuildKit, an OCI cache nobody pays egress for, and the pulumi-Bun saga

devopsfrak20 min read

The Ring Architecture: Shipping a Wallet That Costs Almost Nothing to Embed

Preact, vanilla-TS bootstraps, headless RPC, and the discipline of a 3-chunk eager bundle

devopsfrak20 min read

Rich Share Sheets in a Tauri Mobile App (Without the Usual Compromises)

Typed activity items on iOS, FileProvider thumbnails on Android, and a 2-second race against the share sheet

mobilefrak14 min read

A Tauri Plugin That Survives an App Uninstall: Passkey Continuity on iOS and Android

iCloud KV + Keychain on iOS, Google Block Store + SharedPreferences on Android, and never storing anything sensitive

mobilefrak14 min read

A WordPress Plugin That Doesn't Tank Your Store's Performance

Context-aware bootstrapping, manifest-based block registration, delegating webhooks to WooCommerce's native pipeline, and deleting every line of code we didn't need

engineeringfrak15 min read

Pruning the Last MongoDB Dependency: libSQL, RustFS, and True Kubernetes Portability

One lingering collection, zero cloud lock-in

devopsfrak18 min read

Chasing a Bun Memory Leak for 3 Days (The Answer Was 'Just Restart')

Two-pass builds, forced GC, --smol flags, and a health endpoint that lies to Kubernetes

devopsfrak9 min read

Writing a Native WebAuthn Tauri Plugin from Scratch (iOS + Android)

Replacing simplewebauthn with platform-native passkey APIs - and surviving iOS attestation objects

mobilefrak9 min read

The Supporting Cast: L'Atelier's Infrastructure Beyond the Orchestrator

The orchestrator gets all the glory, but it's the proxy, the cache, and the registry that make the system actually usable.

toolingatelier9 min read

L'Atelier: Why I Deleted 8,702 Lines of Code to Move to Kubernetes

Migrating from a custom Firecracker orchestrator to Kata Containers and k3s. Better portability, less maintenance, and a lot of deleted code.

toolingatelier12 min read

Talk to Your AI Dev Team: L'Atelier Gets a Slack Bot and an MCP Server

Three weeks of daily use revealed the real bottleneck. The dashboard was still one too many clicks away.

toolingatelier11 min read

L'Atelier: Stop Babysitting Your AI Agents

Building a self-hosted Firecracker microVM orchestrator because AI coding agents shouldn't need you watching.

toolingatelier13 min read

The Uncomfortable Truth About ERC-7579 and Modular Smart Wallets

2-3 weeks building a ZK social login wallet. Most of the pain wasn't the ZK part.

opinionweb38 min read

WordForge: AI-Powered WordPress Management via MCP

Building an open-source MCP server because Shopify fees felt wrong and no free alternatives existed.

toolingside-projects6 min read

The DevX Revolution: How We Cut Build Times by 10x at Frak

From Next.js to TanStack Start, Rollup to Rolldown, and 5-minute builds to 30 seconds

devopsfrak8 min read

Extreme Frontend Optimization: How We Cut 30% Off Our Wallet Size

From Jotai to Zustand, AWS to Kubernetes, and achieving faster load times without a CDN

devopsfrak16 min read

Modern Infrastructure as Code: Why We Chose SST & Pulumi over Terraform

Escaping the HCL Trap

devopsfrak21 min read

Pico Kiln - Part 4: Physics-Based PID Tuning with Python

From CSV Logs to Optimal Control Theory

engineeringkiln18 min read

Pico Kiln - Part 3: From Web to Native with Tauri

One React App, Three Platforms, Zero Mixed Content Drama

mobilekiln7 min read

Pico Kiln - Part 2: Firmware Architecture

Industrial Control on a $6 Chip

electronicskiln18 min read

Pico Kiln - Part 1: From 380V Industrial to 220V Smart Kiln

The electrical rewiring journey: Taming a 400kg vintage beast, converting 3-phase power, and solving critical ground faults.

electronicskiln13 min read

Real-Time AI Conversations and Audio Processing

Building responsive voice-guided cooking experiences

system-designcooking-bot14 min read

The Sophisticated Recipe Processing Pipeline

How we process 35,000+ recipes with 99.9% accuracy

system-designcooking-bot15 min read

Safety-First AI for Food Systems

Why we don't trust LLMs with allergies

system-designcooking-bot6 min read

Beyond Text: Modeling Character Psychology with LLMs

Deconstructing Personality with AI

aiscenario-parser18 min read

The Orchestration Engine: Building a Resilient Analysis Pipeline

Event-Driven Architecture & Graph Theory

system-designscenario-parser15 min read

From PDF to Structured Data: The Extraction Layer

Solving the Screenplay Parsing Challenge

electronicsscenario-parser12 min read

Scenario Parser: The Complete Architecture

3-Stage Competitive Parsing Architecture

system-designscenario-parser19 min read

From Idea to Innovation: Unveiling Our WebAuthN Smart Wallet Demo

solidityfrak11 min read

Building Cost-Effective Blockchain Infrastructure: A Journey with eRPC and Ponder

devopsfrak8 min read

Unlocking the Future: WebAuthN Meets ERC-4337 Smart Wallets

solidityfrak9 min read

Frak's Vanguard: Pioneering the Account Abstraction Revolution in the Polygon Ecosystem

Embracing the Future of Blockchain: Frak Leads with Account Abstraction, Redefining User Empowerment and Decentralization on Polygon.

solidityfrak10 min read

ERC-2612: The Ultimate Guide to Gasless ERC-20 Approvals - part 3

Perfecting ERC-2612: Boost Your DeFi Skills with Solidity Unit Testing in Hardhat and Forge

solidityweb38 min read

ERC-2612: The Ultimate Guide to Gasless ERC-20 Approvals - part 2

A deep dive into the Solidity code of gasless ERC-20 approvals ERC-2612

solidityweb36 min read

ERC-2612: The Ultimate Guide to Gasless ERC-20 Approvals - part 1

How to use EIP-712 signatures to save gas, batch approvals and increase security for your ERC-20 tokens.

solidityweb37 min read

Maximizing Quality and Reliability in Solidity: Our Journey from Hardhat to Foundry

Evaluating the performance difference of Hardhat and Foundry for Solidity contract unit testing & reason behind the switch

solidityfrak5 min read

Securing Solidity Smart Contracts

Setting up some free security tools, to prepare a security Audit

solidityweb37 min read