Debugging

A batch job matches free-text line items against a large product catalogue. Supplier wording never matches catalogue wording, so it runs a cascade — remembered aliases, then embedded codes, then exact matches, then fuzzy retrieval, and finally one language-model call to adjudicate the survivors. That last step costs money, so results are cached. I improved the text normalisation feeding the cascade. Tested it properly: extracted the production matching code, ran it against the real catalogue, confirmed zero previously working matches broke and roughly 230 previously failing lines now cleared the acceptance gate. ...

A Raspberry Pi 5 with an OAK-D Pro depth camera bolted to it, recording material on a conveyor belt. First boot on the rig: hard crash within minutes. vcgencmd get_throttled returned 0x50000, the journal had fourteen Undervoltage detected! lines, the USB bus was dead — no camera, no tag reader — and the capture service was in a reset loop. Two days of bench work later the fix was a 20 cm cable. Getting there went through two hypotheses that were both partly right and individually wrong, and ended somewhere more useful than a culprit: an equation with about 0.3 V of headroom in it. ...