Reverse to build

This site is one idea split in two. In Teardowns I pull smart-home and IoT gear apart to see what the firmware is really doing. In Dev Logs I write firmware back together — usually with AI in the loop — and keep an honest diary of how it goes.

Reverse, then build. Taking other people's hardware apart is how I figure out what "good" looks like; building my own is how I find out whether I actually understood it. The two categories live under one roof on purpose — they're the same learning loop, just pointed in opposite directions.

I try to write the way the work actually feels: the dead ends, the rewrites, the things I got wrong and only noticed three commits later. If a teardown changes my mind about something I said earlier, I'd rather show the seam than hide it.

Some of what I learn here feeds a product I'm building called SiliconLens. So you can read anything I say with the right amount of salt, here's the disclosure up front: