About

Hey there đź‘‹

I’m Ryan Duffy, a nerd at heart who loves working with new tech and exploring what can be achieved when humans and AI collaborate.

Background

By day: JNCIS-SP certified Senior Engineer at BT with 13+ years in telecoms. I work in a fast-paced ISP environment supporting global cloud-based connectivity and complex network platforms. Network engineering fundamentals - BGP, OSPF, multi-technology services - have been my foundation.

By night (and weekends): Building AI infrastructure, experimenting with local LLMs, and applying everything I’ve learned about automation (Ansible, Python) and reliability engineering to the world of AI systems. Kubernetes, Elasticsearch, Apache Kafka - the tools that power modern infrastructure - now applied to self-documenting AI systems.

The ConvoCanvas Story

This blog started with a simple problem: context window overflow. September 11, 2025, I hit the limit in a conversation with Claude Code and realized I was drowning in 200+ scattered AI conversations with no way to extract value.

25 days later: A self-documenting system with ChromaDB semantic search, 17 local models, K3s infrastructure, and automated architecture diagrams. All built collaboratively with Claude Code.

Season 1 documents that journey - 8 episodes, 15,550 words, complete with the crashes, the learning, and the honest reality of building in 2025 when AI capabilities evolve weekly.

What I’m About

Building with AI, not replacing humans with AI. Claude provides patterns, I provide context and judgment. Together we solve problems neither could handle alone.

Learning in public. The failures, the overkill decisions (looking at you, K3s), the 6,812 pod restarts - it’s all documented.

Honest iteration over grand promises. The system works. It’s not “done.” We iterate based on what makes sense.

Tech I Use

What’s Next?

Season 2? Maybe. If AI capabilities evolve in interesting ways. If there’s something worth building.

The only certainty: Human + AI collaboration will keep evolving. And I’ll keep documenting it honestly.

Get in Touch

This blog is built with AstroPaper and deployed on Cloudflare Pages. Season 1 was collaboratively written with Claude Code using the very system it documents.