mielony@com:~$ cat about.md

guide entry: the way the Guide introduces a mostly harmless engineer.

origin story building software for a long time, and I still think it's the best job there is. I'm happiest deep in something hard — a streaming platform, an AI agent that actually works, a piece of infrastructure that quietly holds up at scale.

lately it's mostly agents and LLMs — the messy, interesting part where you make them reliable instead of just impressive. Before that: video at scale, distributed systems, and a lot of low-level work close to the metal, which I don't regret.

off the clock it's video games, 3D printing, and a lot of CAD — I like designing parts that have to survive the real world, not just the viewport.

how I work small tools, fast feedback, and code that says what it does. This site is exactly that — a terminal, a few notes, no tracking, no noise.

mielony@com:~$ attention --chart

stat block: no scores, just where the attention goes, work up and hobbies down. The rings are the scale, the shape is me.

mielony@com:~$ guide skills

guide entry: read it as prose, the way the Guide describes a mostly harmless planet.

ai / agents mostly language models on a leash, plus the leashes, the leashes for the leashes, and someone who checks whether the leash holds: LLM agents, tool-calling, LangGraph, LangChain, RAG, hybrid retrieval, pgvector, embeddings, evals, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, LoRA, OpenAI API, Anthropic API, MCP, multi-agent systems, Ollama, vLLM, GPU inference, SSE streaming, guardrails, vision / OCR.

languages tongues spoken while awake, some of them even typed on purpose: TypeScript, Python, C++, Node.js, Bun, JavaScript, SQL, Bash, Go, C#, Java, Lua, GLSL, HTML / CSS.

engineering & cad the slow discipline of parts that have to survive the real world, where sand is rude and gravity keeps its promises: CAD, 3D design, parametric modeling, Fusion 360, FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, GD&T, tolerances, mechanical design, FEA, technical drawing, rapid prototyping, CNC, laser cutting, electronics.

3d printing plastic and resin, extruded in the name of science, occasionally in the name of a bracket that was never going to fit: FDM, resin / SLA, slicing, PrusaSlicer, Cura, Bambu Studio, filament tuning, supports & overhangs, printer calibration, model repair, post-processing.

cloud & platform the machines other machines live on, and the little rituals that keep them from noticing they could stop at any time: AWS Lambda, Fargate, SQS, Docker, Kubernetes, serverless, event-driven, Terraform / CDK, Cloudflare Pages, Cloudflare Workers, GitHub Actions, Nginx, Linux, systemd.

data & streaming pipes, caches and everything that flows, preferably before the user notices it stopped flowing: Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, S3, ClickHouse, HLS, MPEG-DASH, WebRTC, FFmpeg, MQTT, ETL pipelines, caching.

games & graphics play, and the careful pretending that makes it convincing: game design, level design, Unity, Godot, modding, shaders, 3D rendering, Blender.

security & practice the boring habits that keep the exciting things running: OpenTelemetry, Grafana, DDD, TDD, code review, CI/CD, observability, threat modeling.