Atelier Toby
Tech, AI, and dev diary. From first principles.
I needed my dispatch bot to push flight notifications in real time. Instead of adding APIs and state machines, I turned my own habit of checking flights into one formula: max(60s, (ETA - now) / 2).
I modeled my own behavior to avoid over-engineering a flight pollerJune 30, 2026 · 3 min read
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The bolt questionJune 29, 2026 · 3 min readSomeone asked me how I'd build a system to inspect bolts in a factory. I answered like a curious outsider, not a software engineer.I built a dispatch bot in a parking lot at 3amJune 28, 2026 · 4 min readI do airport rides in Hong Kong and sleep in my Tesla. One night between jobs, I finally built the tool I needed — a Telegram bot that parses WeChat order messages into a dashboard.
All posts →The best way to understand something is to build it yourself.
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