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Writing on Engineering

Developer ExperienceMarch 21, 2026 · 3 min read

One Afternoon, 23 Backgrounds

My university capstone took three months in OpenGL. I rebuilt it with AI in 30 minutes — then built 22 more interactive backgrounds for this portfolio.

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Platform Engineering

How I Almost Killed a $600 SSD by Trying to Save It

My SSD protection script was the biggest threat — $180/year in wear from 840 GB of phantom writes across 600 Docker containers.

Apr 9, 2026·9 min
Platform Engineering

NVIDIA's Fan Controller Was Ignoring the Temperature

NVIDIA's RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell crashed daily under ML workloads. 95,000 telemetry samples revealed the fan controller was running at 53% while the GPU hit 92C — one degree from thermal shutdown.

Apr 9, 2026·6 min
AI Systems

Why Most AI Agent Frameworks Fail in Production

Three failure modes I found running multi-agent systems in production at a global enterprise, and the governance patterns that fixed them.

Mar 22, 2026·4 min
Platform Engineering

The EKS Incident That Changed How I Think About Production

A cascading Kubernetes failure across 53 markets taught me more about production reliability than any architecture review ever could.

Mar 22, 2026·6 min
Platform Engineering

$336K in Annual Savings: The FinOps Playbook

How Tyler Wall found $336K hiding in cloud infrastructure at a global enterprise — and built the FinOps discipline to keep finding it.

Mar 22, 2026·5 min
AI Systems

Pioneering GPT-3 in 2022: Before Anyone Knew What ChatGPT Was

In Q2 2022, I shipped GPT-3 at ButcherBox for support automation — saving 2 hours/week/employee with an NPS of 57, six months before ChatGPT.

Mar 22, 2026·4 min
Platform Engineering

Scaling a D2C Platform 100x During COVID: Zero Downtime

How I engineered ButcherBox's backend to handle 10x traffic surges during COVID while competitors went dark — then scaled 100x over four years.

Mar 22, 2026·5 min
AI Systems

I Built a Chatbot for My SpaceX Interview. They Never Saw It.

How I built a production-grade AI chatbot for a SpaceX interview — and what happened when the role disappeared before anyone saw it work.

Mar 22, 2026·4 min
AI Systems

Text Is Not Enough

I built a profile-aware AI chatbot that returns rendered React components — not just text — with 7 tools, 16 personalities, and zero hallucinations.

Mar 21, 2026·4 min
Developer Experience

Why Everything Is Glass

Glassmorphism isn't decoration. It's the solution to putting readable content on top of 23 moving physics simulations. Here's how the design system works.

Mar 21, 2026·3 min
Platform Engineering

Ask ChatGPT Who Tyler Wall Is

The invisible infrastructure that makes this portfolio fast, findable, and cited by AI. Static export, CloudFront CDN, llms.txt, and 1,200+ tests.

Mar 21, 2026·3 min
Developer Experience

One Resume Is Not Enough

15 years across IC and leadership roles. No single resume captures it. So I built a multi-profile YAML system that generates 16 portfolio variants from one codebase.

Mar 21, 2026·4 min