Architecture Notes · Weekly Reflections

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Architecture notes, cost lessons, decision logs, and weekly reflections — all in one thread. Filter by type or tag.

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Week 32 — Database updates and site tweaks

Automated banners, PR merges for CP-020 and CP-018, and a website fix

Review

W2026-08-142 min read

Week 32 — Data Validation & Infrastructure

This week's review covers data validation, infrastructure, and website updates for CryptoPrism and personal projects.

Review

W2026-08-072 min read

Week 31 — Plausible analytics rollout and UI polish

Integrated Plausible self‑hosted analytics across multiple sites and shipped UI tweaks and bug fixes.

Review

W2026-08-072 min read

Week 01 — the portfolio starts writing itself

The first auto-generated weekly review — what shipped across the fleet, what broke, and what's next.

ReviewBuild

J2026-07-31mood: clear3 min read

Why I'm writing this weekly

A new Friday ritual. Three reasons I'm starting a personal journal alongside the technical notes and the founder hub — and what to expect.

LifeBuild

J2026-07-25mood: tired but clear4 min read

What I got wrong about my second startup

Gamerz Nation was my first company at 22. Trinetry was my second. Both taught me things I wish I'd known earlier. The honest version.

LifeBuild

T2026-07-204 min read

Why we built a 72 PB pipeline instead of buying Glassnode

Glassnode charges $800/mo for data we serve at $30/mo. The moat isn't the data — it's the pipeline.

ArchitectureBuild vs Buy

J2026-07-18mood: energised4 min read

Three days shipping the portfolio redesign

How I rewrote the home page, added a desktop metaphor, shipped 12 deep case studies, and wrote 12 architecture notes — all in 72 hours.

Build

T2026-07-143 min read

The $427/yr cost lesson from BigQuery materialized views

Materialized views took our BigQuery bill from $1,200/mo to $36/mo — a 97% reduction.

Cost EngineeringBigQuery

T2026-07-104 min read

Why CryptoScore weights are a product decision, not an engineering one

The composite token rating weights change what users see. That makes them a product decision.

ArchitectureProduct

T2026-07-064 min read

Firebase Auth vs custom JWT: what we chose at CryptoPrism

Firebase for identity, our own JWT for authorisation. Don't outsource authorisation.

SecurityAuth

T2026-07-033 min read

What happens when there's no CI: the pratyaksha deploy

A production app with no push-to-deploy pipeline is an incident waiting to happen.

DevOpsCI/CD

T2026-06-294 min read

Self-hosting LLMs: when to buy vs run your own

The break-even threshold for self-hosting beats APIs: ~1,000-1,600 req/day AND 70B+ quality.

Cost EngineeringAI

T2026-06-224 min read

11 days of missing data: how we backfilled with duplicate-safe writes

Backfilling 11 days of OHLCV data isn't a replay — it's data archaeology.

OperationsData Engineering

T2026-06-154 min read

The GCP to AWS migration: firewall, health checks, and SSL idle drops

A one-afternoon migration, two weeks of recovery. Three problems stacked.

InfrastructureMigration

T2026-05-283 min read

Append vs Upsert: duplicate key violations in time-series pipelines

A 9% failure rate traced to writing to two databases with different write strategies.

DatabaseData Engineering

T2026-05-103 min read

Workflows that disable themselves: GitHub Actions 60-day inactivity trap

Five repos had cron workflows silently disabled by GitHub after 60 days without a commit.

DevOpsCI/CD

T2026-04-253 min read

The SSH key that nobody rotated

A broken SSH deploy job hid behind a green workflow for three weeks.

SecurityDevOps

T2026-04-083 min read

The Instagram auth that broke 10 workflows at once

Ten GitHub Actions workflows failed simultaneously. The root cause was one expired session file.

OperationsSecurity

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