// notes & case studies
What the work taught me
Engineering lessons pulled from real production work — abstracted enough to respect client confidentiality, specific enough to be useful.
Making AI features survive real users
Calling a model in a demo is easy. Keeping AI features reliable and paid-for in production is where the real engineering lives.
Server-rendering a marketing site for SEO
A high-traffic events site was invisible to search in the places that mattered. Moving the right pages to SSR fixed it.
Modelling money and approvals you can trust
Building the finance and payroll core of an ops product taught me that the data model is the product.
When search silently drops the right results
The worst bugs aren't errors — they're correct-looking results that quietly omit what the user needed.
Building a database from scratch, in public
Writing mini_db in C++ is me deliberately climbing under the abstractions I've shipped on for years.
Server-driven UI without the JavaScript spaghetti
Hotwire lets you build rich interactions while keeping the logic on the server — if you resist sprinkling global event listeners everywhere.
Keeping the same data in sync across every screen
When one entity shows up on five screens, a rename in one place has to be true everywhere — instantly. That's a single-source-of-truth problem, not a UI problem.
Modeling a relationship lifecycle that doesn't leak
Invite, accept, connected, disconnect — a two-sided relationship has more states than it looks, and the bugs all live in the transitions.
Shipping a full product solo — on your own infrastructure
You can take a real, i18n, payment-enabled platform from zero to deployed by yourself in weeks — if you own the infra instead of renting a black box.