Jomar Estrella
Why I write
I build small things. Scripts that turned into tools, tools that turned into habits. I am not building large systems and I am not trying to. My instinct is always toward the smallest version that makes the problem go away.
What keeps me at it is one specific feeling and I have never found a better one. Something is opaque, you push at it for a while, and then it opens. It stops being magic and becomes a mechanism, and the moment that happens you can predict it, repair it, and build on top of it. Most people get told they are not technical long before anybody shows them that door is there at all. That bothers me more than it probably should.
Writing is how I find out whether I understood something or only recognised it. You can carry a fuzzy version of an idea around in your head forever and never notice it is fuzzy. You cannot write it down. The page is unforgiving in a way I have come to genuinely enjoy, and a good half of what I know now, I know because I sat down to explain it and found out I could not.
So that is most of what I write here. Where AI models go wrong and why, how to get text out of files that will not hand it over, and how to build the small version instead of buying the large one.
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