Railway

Aug 2021 - May 2025 · 1 project

Jan 2024 - Present · 2 projects

Jul 2025 - Jul 2026 · 1 project

Aug 2026 - Present · 1 project

Why does an LLM API call return an empty string? Reasoning tokens count against max_tokens

Every AI caption call 500'd in production: a reasoning model spent max_tokens thinking, finish_reason was 'length', and my client returned ''.

Aug 2026 · 8 min

How I became CTO at 23 of the company that hired me as a part-time student

Hired part-time in August 2021, CTO of the same company in August 2026 — five years to the month. What actually happened in between, honestly scoped.

Aug 2026 · 3 min

402 MB to 126 MB: what was actually in my Next.js container

My portfolio held 402 MB resident for a static site. Most of it was 26.7 MB of icon JSON the page graph never used but loaded at boot anyway.

Jul 2026 · 4 min

Dropping next/image on purpose: libvips, host cores, and the qualities:[100] trap

My image optimizer re-encoded every image at quality 100 because of a one-value allowlist, while keeping libvips resident. I removed it entirely.

Jul 2026 · 5 min

MALLOC_ARENA_MAX across a glibc bump hiding in an unsuffixed -slim tag

Moving node:24-slim to node:26-slim also crossed Debian stable, glibc 2.36 to 2.41 — the layer MALLOC_ARENA_MAX acts on. So I measured it.

Jul 2026 · 6 min

Build with Bun, serve with Node: dodging a standalone RSS leak

I use Bun everywhere in this repo except the one place that matters most: serving. Why the runtime stage of my Dockerfile is plain node:26-slim.

Jul 2026 · 4 min

Three places a Railway container can get its start command

railway.toml, the Dockerfile CMD, and package.json can each supply a start command. Making all three agree is cheaper than finding out which one won.

Jul 2026 · 5 min

Retiring self-managed VMs and CircleCI + SSH for Railway across a fleet

Moving a fleet of 15+ services off self-managed VMs and CircleCI + SSH onto Railway, and what config-as-code changes about who owns a host.

Nov 2025 · 5 min