Blog
Technical write-ups from the lab
I spent 15 years building systems and never writing about them. This is me fixing that. Some posts might be too detailed, others too generic - I'm still finding the right balance. All feedback welcome at pawel@oljasz.com.
Silent Leadership: A Manifest
Why I invest in people over processes, build teams that understand products deeper than the vendors themselves, and only open support cases when we find real flaws.
Modbus RTU Over USB: Five Lessons From a Year of Polling Solar Inverters
USB-RS485 adapter quirks, pymodbus CPU bugs, silent data corruption, and the wiring trap that cost me a full day. Hard-won lessons from running Modbus RTU on a Raspberry Pi 24/7.
Two Docker One Bug
A stale DNS forwarder in an 8-month-old container. A missing env var from a forgotten Compose overlay. Two silent failures, same evening, both hiding in plain sight.
Deploying a Next.js Site to Cloudflare Workers - The Full Walkthrough
End-to-end guide to deploying a Next.js site on Cloudflare Workers with a custom domain. The gotchas nobody warns you about.
Adding an RTX 5090 GPU Server to a Mac Mini Cluster
A Ryzen 9 9950X3D + RTX 5090 build running Ubuntu, Ollama, and ComfyUI. Custom ISO, driver gotchas, and benchmarks.
Building an LLM Security Pipeline - Guard, Classify, Log Everything
LLM Guard for input scanning, Llama Guard 3 for output classification, Langfuse for observability. A complete security pipeline for self-hosted LLMs.
Building a Hybrid AI Cluster - Mac Mini, Linux, and NVIDIA Under One Roof
A hybrid compute cluster mixing Apple Silicon and NVIDIA GPU on Linux. Thunderbolt mesh, distributed inference, headless management, and every gotcha along the way.
WordHunt - From Weekend Hack to a Platform With 22 Milestones
A word game platform that started as one game and grew into a multi-game educational ecosystem with guilds, live classrooms, achievements, and mobile apps.
FutureGrid - Building a Smart Energy Platform From Scratch
An edge-to-cloud energy management platform. Custom hardware, mTLS, multi-inverter support, cooperative energy balancing, and a lot of debugging WiFi hotspots on embedded Linux.