🧑‍💻 About toString()

Hey, I’m Marco Altea, a software engineer and Senior Architect who’s spent the last 10+ years shipping software, from early-stage for Fortune-500 stacks.

I created toString() because I want to have a way to keep track of learning and interest in engineering and share it with other engineers.

What you’ll find here

Deep dives on practical engineering—retrieval-augmented generation, scalable data pipelines, model-ops, and the architectural trade-offs, review of new platform etc.

Post-mortems & war stories—the bugs that cost us days, the fixes that took minutes (after we finally found them)

Reading & tool recs—the books, papers, and open-source libraries that actually changed the way I build software.

No hype, no paywalls (for now), just honest notes from the trenches.

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Who it’s for

Senior SWE or ML engineer

Tech-lead who has to justify infra decisions in front of a CFO.

Curious builder who enjoys diagrams, code snippets, and the occasional spicy take on product-market fit for AI.

Sound like you? Subscribe for free—you’ll get every new essay.

Supporter tier 💛

Paid subscriptions exist only for readers who want to keep this project independent. Supporters get:

1. Priority inbox—I answer your questions first.

2. A warm fuzzy feeling for funding cloud bills and book purchases.

Everything else remains open to everyone.

Thanks for reading—now let’s build the products we wish existed.

Marco Altea