I wanted to understand how money actually works. Not the metaphors about printing presses or vague explanations about central banks, but the actual accounting entries, balance sheets, and institutional mechanics. Every explanation I found either treated money as a physical commodity or skipped over the details with hand-waving. So I traced the full lifecycle myself: where does legal authority to…
Starting from the simplest possible model, two parties and one ledger, this post derives the full architecture of cross-bank payments through a series of questions. It maps the 7-layer execution pipeline, identifies the cross-cutting concerns that prevent it from breaking, shows who controls each layer and why the settlement layer is intentionally closed to private actors, and traces a single card…
Turn a Raspberry Pi into your own personal cloud server accessible from anywhere on the internet. This guide shows you how to set up a fully functional platform for running your own services using your own domain name, with automatic security and minimal complexity. It's a practical, hands-on project that proves you don't need cloud subscriptions to host your own software, just open-source tools,…
I built this Terraform-managed AWS ML pipeline to run GPU and CPU jobs on demand without paying for idle compute. In this post, I walk through the architecture, the key design choices, and the operational pitfalls to watch for before using this pattern in production.
This project keeps my Markdown-to-HTML workflow simple. It moves the Pandoc options I use all the time into defaults files, includes a local diagram filter, and makes it easy to generate either a full HTML page or an embeddable fragment from the same Markdown source.
I missed a fintech offer despite years of experience because I was underprepared for the exact Java exercise format used in that interview. It changed how I view interview fairness: many rounds optimize for who can solve a specific task, in a specific format, under pressure. That can let a less experienced but better-prepared candidate outperform a stronger but less format-ready one. Some…
SD cards are the default storage medium for Raspberry Pi but their low IOPS, limited write endurance, and susceptibility to corruption make them a poor foundation for anything beyond casual use. This post walks through migrating a live Alpine Linux installation to an external SSD without reinstalling the OS. The approach keeps the SD card as a thin bootloader host and pivots the root filesystem to…
This guide walks through installing Alpine Linux on a Raspberry Pi 4, from image flashing through to a secure, containerized system ready for workloads. It covers a practical five-stage installation workflow, including ARM-specific bootloader and filesystem configuration required for reliable boots. The result is a minimal base system with Docker, SSH hardening, firewall rules, and static…
This guide provides a comprehensive walkthrough for installing Arch Linux from a live disk, configuring GRUB as the bootloader, and selecting the recommended filesystem. Beginning with booting from the live disk, users are guided through partitioning, mounting, and installing the base system. Configuration steps cover timezone, localization, network settings, and the installation of GRUB.