How it unfolded at Sandwatch — the dev diary, oldest first. Six levels, one engineer. Open the threads for what each era taught me. The finished pieces are in #work.
Transferred my C# knowledge from game dev here
Hm, is every backend system just a chunk of coroutines?
Learnt new design patterns — repositories, factories, a node-graph task executor
Learnt how to train and fine-tune AI models
Consistency in generative AI should be a celebrated talent
Built a Discord bot with TypeScript. Finally understood how my favorite communities built their bots.
Ah, so not everything is bundled the way games and mobile apps are. CI/CD finally makes sense.
Hi AWS! You have so many services ^_^
Oh no, I broke something in prod 💀
Endpoints? Oh no, it's CRUD :(
Hm OK, this is actually cool — there's so much to learn
Relational DBs, ACID, idempotency, pagination, lots more!
PKs, FKs, weird relationships
Payments, payment providers, polling vs webhooks. I see how a provider tells an app I've paid now.
Writing code that scales
More LLMs
Seeding a ton of data into databases. Nothing could possibly go wrong, right?
Let's use some of that generative AI understanding to ensure consistency in our outputs
Steps failing during generation is EXPENSIVE. Let's create fallbacks that actually work.
Hmm, we could also set up some GPU workers to host models — this could cut lots of cost down the line
Docker? Images? What on earth
Lambda doesn't seem right for video gen anymore and its timeouts are quite annoying — let's move to Inngest
Now we have enough time to run steps and proper state management — also cheaper to run
Let's learn about optimisation
Let's make it unbreakable, scalable, and easy to test with locally