Personal blog about travels, tech, books, and philosophy
An 11-hour delay out of Surabaya turned into a full day of carrying my own case between eight people who had no shared process. That's a runbook problem, and it's the same one your production systems have.
How preference optimization grew up in chatbots (RLHF, DPO, GRPO) and became the data engine behind Meta's SAM 3D. One human verdict, followed from an A/B click to a 3D-shape judgment.
How I run Claude Code and Codex against two backends at once (company Bedrock for work, my own subscription for personal) with isolated config homes and a few shell aliases.
Both vendors shipped the same /goal primitive within months of each other. Here's the workflow I use to background a full bug fix end-to-end.
An end-to-end, intuition-first explanation of Steve Yegge's multi-agent coding orchestrator, how it has evolved into Gas City, and what its design says about the next layer of developer tools.
How modern multimodal models are wired, and why moving from a vision backbone to a four-modality model takes more than plugging in more encoders.
A from-the-ground-up explanation of PgBouncer: why Postgres needs a connection pooler, what each pooling mode actually does, what breaks under transaction pooling, and how to run the thing in production.
An end-to-end, intuition-first explanation of how modern computer vision works, and why three papers between late 2024 and early 2026 quietly changed the standard stack.
Most people jump straight to coding with AI. That's the mistake. Here's my full single-instance workflow from planning to merge.
My full plugin stack after months of trial and error, why I only install from the official store, and what I tried and dropped.
My full plugin stack after months of trial and error, why I only install from the official store, and what I tried and dropped.
What my late friend Paul's hand-tool woodworking philosophy taught me about the AI coding debate
Anthropic's study shows AI coding tools cut learning by 17%, but the real finding is that curiosity determines everything.
After Claude ignored my CLAUDE.md instruction and switched to npm, I set up hooks that make it impossible for this to happen again.
Testing Gemini 3 Flash's new agentic vision feature with code execution
AI coding tools can ignore explicit project instructions under pressure, which is why human oversight and feedback loops still matter.
Sean Goedecke's viral post on estimation describes a broken org, not reality. Here's what healthy estimation actually looks like.
Keeping your camera on in remote meetings builds trust, helps people remember you, and signals engagement, and the benefits far outweigh the minor fatigue cost.
Our family of four spends 5 days in El Salvador on a budget, navigating rental car chaos, armed security everywhere, two vomiting kids, and discovers a country in the middle of a post-gang renaissance that feels surprisingly like Indonesia.
The people most afraid to look stupid - those with middle status - are trapped in a psychological prison that prevents them from learning and adapting, while both high-status and low-status individuals paradoxically have the freedom to embrace being beginners and thus learn faster in our rapidly changing world.
Andrej Karpathy's Y Combinator talk reveals how we're experiencing computing's most fundamental transformation in 70 years, as LLMs evolve from command-line interfaces to become the new operating systems that will reshape how we build and interact with software.
Captivating sci-fi debut from Hank Green that masterfully explores fame, social media addiction, and humanity's response to the unknown through the story of April May and mysterious alien statues
My journey into Ruby on Rails, exploring the differences in design patterns, type safety challenges, and discovering how delegators and resources can create cleaner, more maintainable code.
Adding a fun "Question of the Day" to your daily stand-ups helps your team actually get to know each other and makes meetings way less boring!
After seven years at Apple, I joined Boon, a logistics AI startup, seeking greater growth potential and leveraging a team with deep domain expertise that knows how to sell what I know how to build
"Wind and Truth" (Stormlight Archive Book 5) delivers interesting character moments but focuses too heavily on mental health and contract law instead of epic fantasy action, earning it 3.5/5 stars.
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) is impressive, handling my daily commute hands-free 95% of the time, but it still has quirks—like occasional lane selection mistakes, red light hesitation, and aggressive yellow light behavior. Despite its flaws, I love the convenience, though my wife remains skeptical.
From doubting Tesla's value to discovering it was my ideal next car, here's how creating a simple comparison spreadsheet completely changed my perspective on buying a used Model Y.
Walking and talking helps me clear my head, but turning those scattered voice notes into something useful felt like a chore—until I found a simple Mac trick that made transcribing effortless. Now, my random thoughts turn into blog posts, reflections, and ideas faster than I can lace up my shoes.
Porting my phone number from Verizon was a frustrating mess of errors and poor service, but switching to US Mobile was a smooth and refreshing experience.
Our family had an unforgettable experience at the Cambrian Code Off
How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain - Book Summary - a blog post by Victor Augusteo
ChatGPT has some limitations that can result in silly mistakes and nonsensical outputs.
Zebras must floss their teeth to maintain good dental health
After years of using markdown and Hugo, I decided to switch to using Notion and NextJS for writing and publishing my website.
Walkable City by Jeff Speck - Book Club Discussion Points - a blog post by Victor Augusteo
How to Build Responsive Newsletter Signup Box for Hugo - a blog post by Victor Augusteo
Weekly Digest 15 - HQ Audio Makes You Smarter, NFT Gambling, FLoC, and Soft Robots - a blog post by Victor Augusteo
Weekly Digest 14 - Neuralink MindPong, Muon g-2, and Foot Fetish - a blog post by Victor Augusteo
Weekly Digest 13 - NFTs, Facebook Hack, Microdosing, Inside istheshipstillstuck.com and others - a blog post by Victor Augusteo
Weekly Digest 12 - a blog post by Victor Augusteo
Weekly Digest 11 - a blog post by Victor Augusteo
BEF Learning & Progress Update 2 - a blog post by Victor Augusteo
Borneo Education Foundation - Progress Update 1 - Mid February 2021 - a blog post by Victor Augusteo
I'm starting a charity to help underprivileged children in Borneo, Indonesia to get quality education. Here's why and how you can help. - a blog post by Victor Augusteo
Best Way to Prepare and Consume Soylent - a blog post by Victor Augusteo
Introducing My New Weekly Digest Newsletter - a blog post by Victor Augusteo
Victor's 2020 Book Awards - a blog post by Victor Augusteo
Nightstand - Woodworking Project Step by Step - a blog post by Victor Augusteo
Think Life a Freak Book Club Discussion Points - a blog post by Victor Augusteo