The Caffeinated Engineer

Architecting with clarity - a design framework

There is a ritual in our industry known as the system design interview. We tend to dread it. We dread it not just because the stakes are high, but…

Jan 25 • Alessandro Lamberti

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Apple + Gemini: the architecture of pragmatism

The recent confirmation of Apple integrating Google’s Gemini into the “Apple Intelligence” ecosystem is a Rorschach test for the industry.

Jan 18 • Alessandro Lamberti

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November 2025

The next data center is in orbit

Why Google is going to space to solve AI's biggest physical constraint: Energy.

Nov 10, 2025 • Alessandro Lamberti

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October 2025

The edge is a battlefield of constraints: latency, power, and dumb hardware

Why edge ML isn't an optimization problem, but a systems engineering one

Oct 20, 2025 • Alessandro Lamberti

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September 2025

How the Gemini Robotics family translates foundational intelligence into physical action

AGI and the barrier of embodied reasoning

Sep 27, 2025 • Alessandro Lamberti

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The work you do in the dark

On depth, discipline, and why we're becoming less interesting

Sep 9, 2025 • Alessandro Lamberti

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August 2025

The Inevitable Chaos: Embracing Failure for Resilient Distributed Systems

Building Systems That Thrive on Failure

Aug 31, 2025 • Alessandro Lamberti

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AlphaEarth Foundations — A single, comprehensive breakdown

The embedding field that treats the planet as data infrastructure

Aug 18, 2025 • Alessandro Lamberti

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Heart, Nerves, and Bones: The Architectural Roles of Kafka, NATS, and ZeroMQ

A practical guide to choosing between durable logs, message buses, and raw sockets.

Aug 4, 2025 • Alessandro Lamberti

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July 2025

Stop Copying - Start Building Reusable Knowledge

An argument against shallow tutorial hopping and in favor of reified personal understanding.

Jul 12, 2025 • Alessandro Lamberti

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Mental Models of Great Engineers - Focus, Friction, Feedback

“The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.” — Edsger Dijkstra

Jul 5, 2025 • Alessandro Lamberti

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June 2025

Hey everyone - I'm writing again

After a long hiatus, I’m back to publishing essays, breakdowns, and notes around the themes I live and breathe: systems, software, and the edges of…

Jun 28, 2025 • Alessandro Lamberti

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