What This Series Builds
This series builds a working ecommerce system that proves you can have sophisticated customer intelligence without storing personal information.
What We Build How It Works...
Wednesday, 31 December 2025 20:00
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14 minute read
In Part 1 we covered the philosophy: transparent segmentation without PII. Part 2 covers session profiles, signals, and segment definitions.
But first: how do you validate any of this without ever...
Wednesday, 31 December 2025 20:00
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9 minute read
In Part 1 we covered the philosophy and series overview. In Part 1.1 we built the sample data generator.
Now let's build the core system. This part focuses on:
Zero-PII profile architecture -...
Wednesday, 31 December 2025 20:00
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20 minute read
Yes and no, I've ALWAYS been able to have multiple ideas in my head at the same time and let them coalesce until it's something I can build (I gave up all the 'social life' parts so it's not ALL...
Tuesday, 30 December 2025 21:35
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1 minute read
NuGet
npm
.NET
Node.js
This is Part 4 of the DocSummarizer series. See Part 1 for the architecture, Part 2 for the CLI tool, or Part 3 for the deep dive on embeddings.
The hard part of RAG isn't the...
Tuesday, 30 December 2025 17:00
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16 minute read
Microservices have become the default "serious system" architecture.
If you want to sound mature, you talk about service meshes, event buses, distributed tracing, and "independent deployability". If...
Monday, 29 December 2025 20:00
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23 minute read
HTTP didn't evolve. It was forced to change by physics, latency, and misuse.
Every version exists because the previous one hit a hard constraint. If you understand those constraints, you understand...
Sunday, 28 December 2025 18:00
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23 minute read
Small and local LLMs are often framed as the cheap alternative to frontier models. That framing is wrong. They are not a degraded version of the same thing. They are a different architectural choice,...
Sunday, 28 December 2025 16:00
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7 minute read
In Part 1, we explored why GraphRAG matters. Now let's build a minimum viable GraphRAG that works without per-chunk LLM calls - pragmatic, offline-first, and cheap enough to run on a laptop:
DuckDB...
Saturday, 27 December 2025 14:00
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11 minute read
Your RAG system is great at "needle" questions: retrieve a few relevant chunks and synthesise an answer. It struggles with two common query types:
Sensemaking: "What are the main themes across this...
Friday, 26 December 2025 12:00
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21 minute read
