Building a Computer on Breadboards (Ben Eater Project, Log 1)
I’m building a computer. Not assembling one with a screwdriver, but building one from logic chips and wire, on breadboards, following Ben Eater’s legendary project series. First up: the clock module. Here’s log one, backwards chip and all.
Kiro Steering Docs vs Skills: When to Use Which
I just spent the evening setting up my blog’s deployment workflow in Kiro, and at the end I had a choice: do I save this as a steering doc or a skill? They both let you give Kiro persistent context, but they work differently and solve different problems.
Here’s how I think about it after going through the decision myself.
What steering docs do
A steering doc is a markdown file that lives in
.kiro/steering/. It’s essentially a note you leave for future Kiro conversations: “here’s how this project works, here’s what to keep in mind.”How I Put This Blog on the Internet with AWS
When I built this blog, getting it running on my own computer was the easy part. Run one command, open a browser, done. The part that felt like a mountain was the next question: how do you take a folder of files on your laptop and turn it into a real website that anyone in the world can visit?
This post is the walkthrough I wish I’d had. No prior cloud experience needed. If you already know your way around DNS and S3, you can skim the steps and grab the Namecheap-specific gotchas. If you’re newer, I’ve linked out to deeper explainers at each tricky part so you can actually understand what you’re doing, not just copy commands. That’s the whole spirit of this blog: do it yourself, and learn how it works while you’re at it.
Why I Love Computers That Are Worse in Every Way
My daily driver has 32GB of RAM and a processor that can run a billion operations per second. My favorite computer to tinker with has 64KB of RAM and runs BASIC. It’s worse in every measurable way, and I love it.
Here’s why: when you have 64KB, every byte matters. There are no layers of abstraction hiding what’s actually happening. No operating system doing a hundred things in the background. No framework of a framework of a framework. It’s just you, the hardware, and whatever you can fit in memory. You type something, and the machine does it. You can understand the entire thing, top to bottom. When’s the last time you could say that about any modern computer?
About
Hi, I’m the person behind this site
I make stuff. Circuits, code, half-finished projects, the occasional small fire. This is where I write about it.
The short version
I’ve got a math degree from The Evergreen State College, a school with no grades where they write you a paragraph instead of a GPA. That tells you something about how I like to learn. Then I spent years trying to break into actuarial science. Passed the P/1 exam. Passed FM/2. Kept knocking on a door that never quite opened.