Lighting the forge
Today I bought shashforge.dev and lit the forge.
This site is a standing commitment: a public log of engineering artefacts, documenting the real work of building AI systems — not hot takes, not link roundups. What I designed, what I built, what broke, what I measured, and what I’d do differently.
Why a public log
Three reasons:
- Writing is compression. If I can’t explain a design decision in a few paragraphs, I don’t understand it yet.
- Consistency is the signal. Anyone can write one great post. A steady public stream of artefacts is much harder to fake — and much more honest about how engineering actually happens: incrementally.
- The field moves fast, so the log has to. Agentic systems, LLM serving, evals, retrieval — the ground shifts every week. Publishing as I build forces me to stay in contact with the ground.
What this stack is
Deliberately boring, which is the point:
- Jekyll static site — a new post is just a Markdown file
- GitHub Pages for hosting — every post is a commit, deploys on push
- shashforge.dev via Namecheap DNS —
.devenforces HTTPS at the TLD level
Total moving parts: approximately zero. All the energy goes into the content, none into the plumbing. The interesting infrastructure writing belongs in the entries, not under them.
What’s coming
The log will orbit the problems I care about professionally: agentic system architecture, LLM platform engineering, retrieval done properly, and the distributed-systems reality underneath AI products. Expect diagrams, benchmarks, and honest failure reports.
The first entry is the easiest one. More soon.