Bin's Lab

https://binhsu.github.io/Bin's LabHands-on engineering experiments and field notes. 2026-07-09T19:27:35+02:00 Pin-Feng (Bin) Hsu https://binhsu.github.io/ Jekyll © 2026 Pin-Feng (Bin) Hsu /assets/img/favicons/favicon.ico /assets/img/favicons/favicon-96x96.png Five AI red flags that mean run away2026-07-09T14:00:00+02:00 2026-07-09T14:00:00+02:00 https://binhsu.github.io/five-ai-red-flags/ Pin-Feng (Bin) Hsu

Self-declared AI-first companies reveal themselves in single sentences. Five signals that separate real adoption from theater, one probe question each — and the closing question that fires past all five.

Validating a platform for $3: a frugal validation pyramid for solo platform engineers2026-07-06T11:00:00+02:00 2026-07-06T11:00:00+02:00 https://binhsu.github.io/validating-a-platform-for-3-dollars/ Pin-Feng (Bin) Hsu

No employer footing the bill, no shared sandbox with a leave-it-running culture — every hour a control plane stays up is my money. That constraint quietly made my platform worse, until I inverted who owns what.

Running k3s on Apple's container runtime — HA clusters, one micro-VM per node2026-06-28T14:00:00+02:00 2026-07-09T09:55:21+02:00 https://binhsu.github.io/k3s-clusters-apple-container-k3ac/ Pin-Feng (Bin) Hsu

Every local-dev Kubernetes tutorial puts all nodes on a shared kernel. Apple's container runtime breaks that assumption — one micro-VM per node, real DHCP IPs, no Docker daemon. The interesting part came when I tried to make the control plane highly available.

Platform metrics are four promises, not a list to memorize2026-06-19T11:00:00+02:00 2026-07-09T09:55:21+02:00 https://binhsu.github.io/platform-metrics-four-promises/ Pin-Feng (Bin) Hsu

Every platform-engineering interview eventually asks how you measure the platform. The weak answer recites DORA. The strong one knows the metrics group into four promises a platform makes — and that most teams only keep two of them. The full reference table, and the one family almost everyone forgets.

Knative, ECS, and the cognitive load that won't disappear2026-06-19T07:00:00+02:00 2026-07-09T09:55:21+02:00 https://binhsu.github.io/knative-ecs-cognitive-load/ Pin-Feng (Bin) Hsu

ECS and Cloud Run feel effortless because someone else runs the substrate. Knative can match that developer experience — but self-host it and the load doesn't vanish, it moves to your platform team. A look at where the simplicity actually comes from.