Chris Baldwin - Voidtalker

Voidtalker

Chris Baldwin

Father. Site Reliability Engineer. Thinking about systems — technical and human.

The Craftsman’s Approach to Building With AI

The Craftsman’s Approach to Building With AI

The first of a two part TruthByte retrospective Last month, I built TruthByte—a Zig + WASM trivia engine with a serverless trust-scoring backend—for the AWS Lambda Hackathon. It’s a tiny game with a big goal: crowdsourcing true-or-false questions to improve AI evaluation datasets. What good is training a

So Now the Company Wants You to Use AI

So Now the Company Wants You to Use AI

"We should be exploring AI," someone said. What does that mean? For a lot of us, it means we’re now unofficial AI consultants, whether we asked for it or not. The Corporate Predicament Executives want innovation using AI, but often don’t know what that means. There’

Thoughts on Open Source North 2025: LLMs, Agents, and Diagrams

Thoughts on Open Source North 2025: LLMs, Agents, and Diagrams

I spent the day at Open Source North, and it was exactly the sort of conference experience I love: real ideas, real people, and those moments when you see someone’s mind click. One of the most down-to-earth talks was about LLM evaluation. The analogy of treating LLMs like a

Talking to the Ghost in the Machine: How to Interface with ChatGPT

Talking to the Ghost in the Machine: How to Interface with ChatGPT

An interface allows two or more separate components of a system to exchange information. Communication requires an interface. I hope to illustrate the values I've learned interfacing with AI. * The Newbie Zone, or Chronic Googler Tries AI * Assist the Stuff You Dread or Something New * Conversational Benefits * Key

What I'm Building in Zig: An Automatic ARPG

What I'm Building in Zig: An Automatic ARPG

I’ve mentioned I’m building a game in Zig, and it's about time to start talking about the project. Before I dive into old commits and share what I've learned on my Zig adventure, I want to lay out what I’m building, and why.

One Month of Zig: Projects, Pitfalls, and Progress

One Month of Zig: Projects, Pitfalls, and Progress

Goals: – Understand Zig as a language and ecosystem as quickly as possible – Work on a personal project that helps me learn and (hopefully) make something worth sharing – Make progress regularly Learning Zig The most straightforward place to start is the Learn tab on Ziglang.org. I followed the getting started

Mapping the Dark Room: How I Learn (and Why I'm Not Afraid of Zig)

Mapping the Dark Room: How I Learn (and Why I'm Not Afraid of Zig)

How I Approach Learning I learn new concepts best by consistently playing around. Tinkering and poking at things to see how they break or why they don’t. Exploring interactions, taking things apart to put them back together, and chasing novelty—it all has consequences. "What happens when..."

Just Zig Things: Why I Chose Zig

From arcade esports to low-level language design—how I ended up tinkering with Zig. Q. What's a Killer Queen player's favorite Zig builtin? A. @abs Why I Tried Zig Video games got me into software. They've been part of my identity for as long

Hello, world!

"First" Introduction I'm Chris Baldwin. This is my blog. I'm a husband, father, engineer, and gamer based in Minneapolis. I believe in building community, growing through skill, and occasionally hitting “Continue?” before the timer runs out. Computers and video games have been with me