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The best of aarongxa.com, organized by what you’re looking for.

For Engineers (SRE, Platform, DevOps)

Dive into production debugging, infrastructure optimization, and real-world fixes.

• Fixing GLM-5.1 Timeouts in Hermes Agent - Root-cause debugging that led to an upstream PR. A 7-minute walk through three interacting systems and the one-line fix.
• Debugging: When Your Cloudflare Worker Returns Null - How I diagnosed a silent failure in production and added defensive code to prevent it from happening again.
• Optimizing Cloudflare Workers KV: A 91% Reduction in Write Operations - From 2,400 writes/day to ~216 with smarter caching and change detection.

For AI Builders & Agent Engineers

Practical experience with the tools and models shaping the agent landscape.

• Hermes Agent: Setup, Tips, and Tricks - A comprehensive guide to the self-improving AI agent: skills, memory, cron jobs, subagents, and the tips that actually matter.
• My Shell Setup: Ghostty, zsh, and AI-Powered Tools - Terminal configuration with a custom ShellGen function that generates commands from natural language using a local LLM.
• The Executive’s Guide to Vibe Coding - An 8-step framework for using AI tools like Cursor to maintain technical depth as an engineering leader.

For Tech Leaders & Managers

Systems for onboarding, team building, and leading with technical credibility.

• The Onboarding Algorithm: A 30-Day System for Tech Leaders - A repeatable playbook for VP, CIO, and CPO transitions: discovery, pattern recognition, stakeholder alignment, and early wins.
• The Ambition Loop: A 10-Year Retrospective - How deliberate daily habits compound into sustained ambition over a decade.
• Why Emotional Detachment Matters in Tech - A short reflection on separating identity from outcomes in high-stakes environments.

For Builders & Automators

Tools, scripts, and widgets that remove friction from daily work.

• Control GlobalProtect from the macOS Terminal - A bash script that replaces VPN GUI clicking with gp start, gp stop, gp kill.
• Orbital: A Minimal Desktop Pomodoro Timer for macOS - A custom Übersicht widget that stays visible without demanding attention.
• Things I Believe In - My personal principles on learning, leverage, and building.

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