While I primarily used ChatGPT for day-to-day personal tasks, I switched between ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Claude and all of them are pushing $20+ per month (minimum) subscriptions on users to access their basic models. If my family wants…
This post is part of a multi-part series documenting the architecture, design decisions, and trade-offs behind building Yaldi.chat. Handling Image Metadata, Fingerprinting, and Search Beyond SQL Beyond just imges, emotes are symbols, var…
I prefer using Cloudflare for its ease of use and super generous free tier offering. I like AWS Lightsail for similar reasons -- you can spin up, essentially, a minimal EC2 Linux instance for $5-$10 a month and it has a lot of configuratio…
John539.com was built to be reliable, understandable, inexpensive, and easy to evolve/iterate upon. This post focuses on why the architecture looks the way it does vs the tactical details of the service. The Problem I Wanted to Solve I w…
Building Yaldi.chat: Why Cloudflare R2 + CDN Beat S3 + CloudFront Images are deceptively expensive. They’re easy to underestimate because each one is small, static, and simple. But at scale—especially when you’re se…
Building Yaldi.chat: Why PostgreSQL on Neon Beat Supabase and Traditional RDS Databases tend to lock in architectural decisions longer than almost anything else. Migrating a database—especially one that holds production data and enf…
Building Yaldi: Why AWS Lambda + API Gateway Was the Right Call The easy part of building Yaldi was storing metadata. The hard part is everything around it: authentication, abuse resistance, performance, cost control, and scaling without …
In this first part of my series on building Yaldi.chat, I dive into the architectural decisions and constraints that shaped our Twitch emote platform. If you're grappling with building scalable, maintainable systems without the usual compl…
My Problem While there's a slew of automated trading solutions for both stocks and crypto, I wanted to try building my own as a learning exercise and to give myself more control. A few of the solutions boast some form of ML-driven logic b…
My disappointment with my Amazon Echo/Alexa device doubled every time I tried to use it and, after some recent exploration with live video streaming, I wanted to pair my desire for a quirky voice assistant with my desire to learn more abou…
Get an email when I publish new posts. No spam, just new writing.