Occasional notes on the things I build and the problems around them — media provenance, secure delivery, and running backend systems in production.
The EU AI Act's Article 50 and California's SB 942 took effect on the same day. What is actually deployed for media provenance — generation-time watermarks, C2PA credentials, fingerprinting — why the industry says no ...
Read →The old pitch was a list — languages, systems, companies. That list describes a job that used to exist. What replaces it is closer to a role than a skillset, and there is no clean noun for it yet.
Read →Everything you send to a model is free text, and free text leaks. data_redactor now ships an opt-in RubyLLM integration that scrubs PII and secrets from every outbound request — prompts, tool definitions and tool resu...
Read →Feasibility research done before a hackathon: what breaks when you try to recover a watermark from a screenshot of a rendered 3D model, and why the failed experiments turned out to be the thing worth having.
Read →Two weeks, a stack I'd never shipped, and an AI doing most of the typing. What I learned was less about the tech than about how to point it.
Read →API keys, IBANs, credit cards and national IDs leak into logs, indices and audit trails. data_redactor is a Ruby gem with a C extension that finds and replaces them — 88 built-in patterns, scanned in a single pass.
Read →Europeana's search endpoint and record endpoint don't return the same schema with fields omitted — they return a flat index document versus a knowledge graph. What that difference means when you build on the API.
Read →Two fields sit quietly in every Europeana record: contentTier and metadataTier. What they mean, how they're calculated, and what a given combination tells you about a record's quality — gathered into one place.
Read →Propagating a trace context from a FastAPI gateway into an asynchronous Temporal workflow turned into a rabbit hole. The fix was deleting the custom interceptor and using the one that already existed.
Read →An hour lost to Nginx logs for a failure that never reached Nginx. The default 4MB gRPC message limit was rejecting uploads inside the local process — a lesson in auditing every hop in the request lifecycle.
Read →Split every 500 characters and you cut sentences in half. semantic_chunker is the first Ruby gem for true embedding-based semantic splitting — grouping sentences by meaning rather than by character count.
Read →Ruby's Array hits a performance wall on insertion and deletion near the head of a large list. DLinked brings the doubly-linked list to Ruby with an idiomatic interface and O(1) operations at both ends.
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