Category
Personal
8 posts
Stories from 20+ years in the industry — the lessons that only come with time, and what it means to build a career you believe in.
I Built a Game That Teaches Git by Making You Type Real Commands
Most git tutorials show you diagrams. Gitvana drops you in a terminal inside a pixel-art monastery and makes you earn your enlightenment one commit at a time.
How I Built a Real-Time Geopolitical Event Pipeline with Embeddings and LLMs
A deep technical walkthrough of a 7-stage pipeline that ingests 100+ RSS feeds, clusters articles with vector embeddings, synthesises structured events through multi-pass LLM processing, and serves them on a live dashboard with conflict tracking and automated alerting.
Building Global Crisis Monitor: A Real-Time Geopolitical Intelligence Dashboard
I built a system that ingests 80+ news feeds, clusters them with embeddings, synthesises events with AI, and surfaces a live map and briefings-plus auto-publishing to X and Threads.
I built the tool my public-speaking anxiety needed
A zero-friction teleprompter for talks and Zoom: no signup, no backend, with a compact mode that keeps you looking at the camera instead of the script.
How I Built My Perfect Family Budget App in Just 3 Days
Frustrated by budget apps that couldn't tell me where my money went, I built my own with Next.js and automation—and got real visibility in days.
The Year I Stopped Apologizing for the Chaos
Parenting young kids while leading a team: on guilt, the myth of balance, and finally refusing to apologize for being human.
When the hard part was the point
Solving a problem in seconds with AI left me feeling robbed—of the struggle, the flow, and the identity built around enduring the friction.
Imposter Syndrome for New Lead Developers: Overcoming Self-Doubt
Stepping into a lead role often brings imposter syndrome. How to shift from needing all the answers to enabling the team to find them together.