Over a 72 hour sprint I took a very tiny experimental 0.5 billion parameter Qwen3-MoE-style model to Chinchilla level of tokens (10 billion) from taking 60+ hours to 13.2 on 4 at-my-home graphics cards. This involved numerous tricks, learning different tools, and figuring out where bottlenecks existed and how to go about them. Join me as I talk about the secrets most find through experience.