Production field notes
Field notes from production on infrastructure, networking, reverse engineering, PDF internals, and AI-assisted software development.
Articles
Dhivehi PDFs exported from Word extract at 23% word agreement with the document they came from. The pages are not damaged, they are misread: one broken ToUnicode entry and a glyph order nobody reorders. Recovering both takes the same pages to 99.7%, with no model involved.
Generating Code Was Never the Bottleneck: What Two Codebases Taught Me About Auditing AIBuild Log / AI-Assisted DevelopmentI build most of my code with AI now. The hard part turned out not to be getting the model to write it. The hard part was proving it did not quietly lie. This is the verification method I converged on across two unrelated projects, the data behind it, and the parts that do not work.
PDF Text Is Not Text: What I Learned Building rihaPDFBuild Log / PDF InternalsrihaPDF started as a simple browser editor for Dhivehi PDFs. Most of the work became display fidelity: source text ownership, Thaana shaping, bidi punctuation, Lexical paragraphs, and saved PDF output that matched the editor.
Cloudflare Mesh, WARP Connector, and the Routes Nobody Tells You AboutField Report / Cloudflare MeshCloudflare Mesh is in public beta and looks dead simple on paper. The reality involved tcpdump, nftables, and FRR before a Worker could reach a private LAN. Here is what actually had to happen.
Deconstructing BrählerOS: Reverse Engineering a Parliamentary Protocol from ScratchResearch / Protocol Reverse EngineeringHow I reverse engineered a closed parliamentary conference management system — decompiling .NET binaries, reconstructing a binary TCP protocol, and shipping a production Node.js client — with no documentation and no SDK.
Two Years with Azure Local: Why I Chose ProxmoxField Report / Hyperconverged InfrastructureTwo years of production evaluation of Azure Local, and why I moved to Proxmox with Ceph instead.