Writing · Platform & cloud-native

Notesfromthecluster

Long-form technical writing on Kubernetes, service mesh, CI/CD and the developer experience — worked examples, diagrams, and the occasional algorithm.

Latest·23 JUNE 2026·5 min read

Backprop is just the chain rule

Training a neural network sounds mystical, but the engine underneath is one idea from first-year calculus: the chain rule, applied backwards through a computation graph and reusing its work. We trace a forward and backward pass through a tiny graph, see why we run it in reverse, and connect it to the downhill step that actually does the learning.

softwaremachine-learningcalculus

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Software23 JUNE 2026· 5 min read

How to paint with noise

Image generators start from pure TV static and end with a photo. The trick that makes it possible is wonderfully sneaky: don't learn to paint, learn to remove a little noise, then run that backwards from static. We build the forward noising process step by step, see the signal-versus-noise schedule, and work out why predicting noise is such a clever thing to train.

softwaremachine-learningdiffusiongenerative-ai

Software23 JUNE 2026· 5 min read

Three rules build a computer

Conway's Game of Life has three rules and a grid of on-or-off cells, and nothing else. From that, gliders crawl, guns fire, and — astonishingly — you can build a working computer. We play with the rules, watch structure emerge that nobody designed, and follow the thread to its unsettling end: a system this simple can be impossible to predict.

softwareemergencecellular-automata

Electrical Eng23 JUNE 2026· 5 min read

What JPEG throws away

A JPEG is often a tenth the size of the raw image and you can't see the difference. Where did ninety percent of the data go? We follow an 8×8 block through the discrete cosine transform and quantisation to find out: JPEG sorts a picture by spatial frequency, then quietly bins the fine detail your eyes barely register.

electrical-engineeringsignalscompression

Mathematics23 JUNE 2026· 6 min read

Why everything becomes a bell curve

The bell curve turns up in heights, measurement errors, exam marks and sensor noise, and that is not a coincidence — it is a theorem. We work through the central limit theorem with a Galton board and a random walk: why adding up enough independent things, almost whatever they are, always lands on the same curve, and when it doesn't.

mathematicsstatisticsprobability

Physics23 JUNE 2026· 5 min read

Why time only runs forwards

The microscopic laws of physics run the same forwards and backwards, yet eggs never unscramble and gases never un-mix. We resolve the paradox with a box of mixing particles: the arrow of time isn't a force, it's a counting argument — there are overwhelmingly more messy arrangements than tidy ones, so disorder wins by sheer weight of numbers.

physicsthermodynamicsentropy

Electrical Eng23 JUNE 2026· 5 min read

Why your shower temperature oscillates

The scalding-then-freezing shower dance isn't you being bad at taps — it's a feedback loop fighting a time delay, and it has a name. We meet the PID controller behind thermostats, cruise control and showers, tune one live, and find out why a little lag turns sensible corrections into oscillation.

electrical-engineeringcontrolfeedback

Software22 JUNE 2026· 11 min read

A transformer reads everything at once

The transformer's one real trick is reading every token at once and letting each decide what matters. We put the whole machine on the bench — embeddings, positions, the residual stream, the feed-forward step — and work out why reading everything at once was such a departure, and why something so architecturally dull keeps getting smarter the more we feed it. With an interactive animation for every piece.

softwaremachine-learningdeep-learningtransformers

Software21 JUNE 2026· 7 min read

Repair is just solving in disguise

I gave a 160M-parameter Go model a reflect-and-fix loop so it could bootstrap past its own ceiling. It fixed zero bugs. The reason runs deeper than the code — and it taught me my model had been memorising all along.

machine-learningllm

Electrical Eng19 JUNE 2026· 6 min read

Filters from Poles and Zeros

A filter is two polynomials, and the roots of those polynomials are the whole story. Place a few points in the complex plane and you can read the entire frequency response straight off the geometry — no calculus required at the point of use.

eesignalsfilters

Software19 JUNE 2026· 5 min read

Learning by Rolling Downhill

Every neural network you've ever used was trained by the oldest trick in calculus: to minimise a function, walk downhill. The whole story of modern optimisers is a list of the specific ways plain downhill walking fails, and the patch for each.

softwaremachine learningoptimization

Physics18 JUNE 2026· 5 min read

Quantum Tunnelling You Can See

Quantum tunnelling isn't an energy loophole: a wave decays through a wall instead of stopping. Watch a packet split, and see the exponential that keeps the Sun lit.

physicsquantumquantum mechanics

Mathematics18 JUNE 2026· 5 min read

How the Leopard Got Its Spots

Two chemicals that do nothing but react and spread can break a blank sheet into spots, stripes, and mazes. Turing's last great idea was that diffusion, the great smoother, is also where pattern comes from.

mathsnonlinear dynamicspattern formation

Software18 JUNE 2026· 12 min read

Four ways to shrink a KV cache

A transformer's KV cache is a four-dimensional tensor, and every compression trick — quantisation, eviction, cross-layer sharing, linear attention — attacks one of its axes. Here is the tour, and the cautionary tale of a tiny code model whose accuracy fell 20 points because a smoke test never exercised the one axis that bites.

softwaremachine-learningllmtransformers

Software17 JUNE 2026· 5 min read

A* Search, Visually: the Heuristic Is the Whole Game

A* is not a clever algorithm so much as Dijkstra plus a bet about the future. The same code becomes Dijkstra, greedy best-first, or A* depending on one term in the priority key — and admissibility is the single property that buys optimality.

softwarealgorithmscomputer scienceai

A* Search, Visually: the Heuristic Is the Whole Game

Electrical Eng17 JUNE 2026· 12 min read

AM, FM, QAM: A Tour of the Modulation Zoo

Every modulation scheme is the same act — painting information onto a carrier — and they differ only in which property of the carrier you paint on. Plotted as a constellation, AM is a line, FM is a circle, and QAM is a grid.

electrical engineeringcommunicationsmodulationdsp

AM, FM, QAM: A Tour of the Modulation Zoo

Software17 JUNE 2026· 14 min read

B-Trees vs LSM-Trees: The Two Religions of On-Disk Data

Every database you use bets on one of two storage engines: B-trees (read-optimised, update-in-place) or LSM-trees (write-optimised, append-and-compact). The choice isn't about speed but about which kind of amplification you're willing to pay.

softwaredatabasesdata structuressystems

B-Trees vs LSM-Trees: The Two Religions of On-Disk Data

Physics17 JUNE 2026· 12 min read

Band Gaps Are Just Bragg Reflection

The forbidden energy gap that makes a semiconductor a semiconductor is not a quantum mystery. It is the exact same wave interference that makes an X-ray diffract off a crystal or a soap film show colour.

physicscondensed mattersolid statequantum

Physics17 JUNE 2026· 7 min read

Every Qubit Gate Is a Rotation

Quantum computing is taught as alien linear algebra. On the Bloch sphere it collapses to one homely fact: a qubit is an arrow on a ball, and every operation you can do to it is a rotation of that arrow.

physicsquantumquantum computing

Mathematics17 JUNE 2026· 12 min read

Every Wave Is a Circle: Fourier Series as Epicycles

We are taught Fourier as an integral to memorise. The geometric truth is older and stranger: any periodic signal, however square or spiky, is drawn by a stack of spinning circles — the same epicycles Ptolemy used for the planets.

mathematicsfourieranalysissignal processing

Every Wave Is a Circle: Fourier Series as Epicycles

Electrical Eng17 JUNE 2026· 7 min read

Every Wire Is an RLC Circuit: Why Your Digital Signal Rings

There is no such thing as a digital signal at the physical layer. The clean trapezoid you draw is a fiction; every trace is a distributed RLC network, and the ringing and reflections are the lumped RLC step response playing out at picosecond timescales.

electrical engineeringsignal integritycircuitsrf

Every Wire Is an RLC Circuit: Why Your Digital Signal Rings

Software17 JUNE 2026· 14 min read

How Python Dicts Really Work: Open Addressing, Probing, and the djb2 Lie

The dict is the most-used data structure in Python and almost nobody knows it uses open addressing, not chaining — so a single deletion leaves a tombstone, and a simple hash table is really a careful dance between load factor, probe sequences, and cache lines.

softwaredata structurespythoncomputer science

How Python Dicts Really Work: Open Addressing, Probing, and the djb2 Lie

Mathematics17 JUNE 2026· 11 min read

The Lorenz Attractor and the Limits of Prediction

Determinism does not imply predictability. Lorenz's three-equation toy weather model is fully deterministic yet unknowable past a horizon you can compute — a geometric fact, not an engineering failure.

mathematicschaosdynamical systemsphysics

The Lorenz Attractor and the Limits of Prediction

Physics17 JUNE 2026· 13 min read

Normal Modes: Why Coupled Things Beat, and When They Become Chaos

Two pendulums linked by a spring look hopelessly complicated. But there is a change of coordinates in which the same system is just two independent pendulums that never talk to each other. The mess is an illusion of the basis you chose.

physicsmechanicsnormal modeschaos

Normal Modes: Why Coupled Things Beat, and When They Become Chaos

Mathematics17 JUNE 2026· 4 min read

Phase Portraits: See a Differential Equation Before You Solve It

Most nonlinear ODEs have no formula, yet their fate is readable from the vector field. Poincare's trick: classify fixed points, limit cycles, and chaos by geometry.

mathematicsdynamical systemsdifferential equations

Phase Portraits: See a Differential Equation Before You Solve It

Electrical Eng17 JUNE 2026· 12 min read

Build a Software-Defined Radio in 100 Lines

A radio is no longer hardware. Once you sample the antenna fast enough, every classic RF block — mixer, filter, demodulator — becomes a few lines of arithmetic on a stream of complex numbers. The antenna is the last analog component.

electrical engineeringsdrdspradio

Build a Software-Defined Radio in 100 Lines

Algorithms14 JUNE 2026· 11 min read

Attention, From the Inside Out

Attention is just a weighted average whose weights the data computes by asking itself questions. A worked tour through scaled dot-product attention, temperature and sampling, and what a representative 46B-active / 1T-total Mixture-of-Experts spec actually means — with live matrices you can poke.

technologyalgorithmsmachine-learningdeep-learning

Electrical Eng10 JUNE 2026· 8 min read

PLL Design from First Principles

A phase-locked loop is a control system with a phase detector instead of a summing junction. The intuition you can build with the lab above is more durable than the textbook derivations.

technologyalgorithmsphysicselectrical engineering

Electrical Eng10 JUNE 2026· 7 min read

The Smith Chart is Geometry

What looks like a chart for radio engineers is really a Möbius transform drawn on the complex plane. A visual essay on why impedance matching is a question of circles, lines, and rotations.

technologyalgorithmsphysicselectrical engineering

Algorithms08 JUNE 2026· 23 min read

The Neural Network Zoo, Revisited

A guided tour through the Asimov Institute's Neural Network Zoo — every architecture from the poster, with intuition for what each one is actually for and an interactive SVG diagram for the major families.

algorithmsmachine-learningdeep-learning

Service Mesh04 JULY 2020· 1 min read

Istio "Service Mesh" Topologies

Overview of some common Istio Service Mesh topologies and configuration examples and diagrams

technologykubernetesservice meshistio

Google Cloud24 SEPT 2019· 1 min read

GKE Auto Scale Down for Fun and Profit

How to sleep at night when actively developing on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) using Google Cloud Scheduler

technologyGCPkubernetes

Kubernetes22 SEPT 2019· 12 min read

Kubernetes-centric Continuous Delivery - Part 2 (Tekton Pipelines)

An overview of the current kubernetes-native ci/cd ecosystem, With a demonstration of an end-to-end Tekton based workflow for build, test and deployment of a fullstack application

technologyCI/CDGCPkubernetes

Kubernetes23 AUG 2019· 17 min read

Kubernetes-centric Continuous Delivery - Part 1 (Developer Experience)

How we can get closer to unifying the local developer experience with production-grade kubernetes run-time environments

technologyGCPkubernetescontainers

Algorithms28 MAY 2019· 4 min read

Two Number Sum

Three solutions to Two Number Sum, from O(n^2) brute force to an O(n) hash set to an O(1)-space two-pointer scan — and the memory-vs-compute trade-off behind each.

algorithmspersonalgopython

CI/CD · Tekton13 MAY 2019· 9 min read

Getting started with Tekton

Developing basic CI and CD pipelines in Tekton and deploying this both to local and cloud based environments

technologyCI/CDGCPkubernetes

Local Dev06 MAY 2019· 5 min read

Install Minikube

Instructions for the installation, upgrade and other customization of a Minikube install on MacOS. As well as a basic example of deploying a service and exposing it for local access

technologykubernetesdeveloper experience

Kubernetes30 APR 2019· 3 min read

Helm use-cases

A practical look at Helm, the Kubernetes package manager — what a chart is, how Go templating and Sprig drive value substitution, how releases and revisions work, and when to reach for Helm over Kustomize

technologykubernetesdeveloper experience

Kubernetes30 APR 2019· 4 min read

Exploring Kapitan

Exploring Kapitan as a generic configuration management tool: its reclass-style inventory, multiple input types, and the single-source-of-truth model that compiles one set of parameters into many outputs

technologykubernetesdeveloper experience

React21 APR 2019· 2 min read

Common Hooks

Working React Hooks examples — a stale-closure-proof counter and a custom useResizeObserver — plus when useReducer replaces Redux and why ResizeObserver beats IntersectionObserver.

technologyreact

Field Notes17 APR 2019· 1 min read

Hello World

The first post on Ben Ebsworth's blog: a living, personal-wiki space for exploring technologies, capturing learnings, and refining ideas over time.

generalpersonal