Engineering Blog
Real problems, real solutions, real code. Production debugging, performance optimization, and lessons learned building with AI.
The Guilty Boundary Experiment
What happened when I set boundaries without explaining, apologizing, or softening—a 30-day experiment that revealed my guilt was entirely self-imposed.
Why Your Gut Feeling Has a Blind Spot
The day I trusted my intuition and was completely wrong—unpacking emotional false positives, when your nervous system lies, and how to debug your gut's algorithm.
How to Actually Work With AI: The Collaboration Framework (Part 1)
Most people use AI like a search engine. Here's what happens when you treat it like a collaborator—the workflow that lets us ship 40,000 words of content in a single session.
How to Actually Work With AI: Advanced Patterns (Part 2)
The masterclass—specific prompting patterns, developing AI taste, session management for long projects, and the meta-skill of learning to learn with AI.
The Maintenance Work No One Sees
Emotional project management, invisible labor, and why 'just asking' isn't simple—the hidden work of tracking everyone's needs and why it exhausts you before anyone notices.
The Performative Confidence Gap
Why the people who look most confident often feel the least secure—and how performing certainty prevents us from building the real thing.
Reading the Room vs. Reading the Silence
The invisible curriculum of social threat detection—how hypervigilance to rejection cues becomes chronic monitoring, why you can't turn it off, and how to recalibrate when survival skills outlive their usefulness.
The Cost of Being Low-Maintenance
Why the easiest person in the room often pays the highest price—examining the reinforcement schedules that reward self-suppression and turn accommodation into self-abandonment.
The Translator Tax
The invisible labor of being the person who explains, bridges, and interprets between people—and why emotional translation is skilled work that rarely gets credited.
When 'Fine' Isn't Fine
The vocabulary of emotional minimization—how we learned to shrink our feelings into acceptable words, and what it costs us to keep doing it.
Building Interactive Cybersecurity Labs with React & Framer Motion
How I built fully interactive Red/Blue/Purple Team security labs with real-time visualizations, network topology diagrams, and packet capture simulations using React, TypeScript, and Framer Motion.
TypeScript Patterns That Actually Make Code Better
TypeScript is more than just 'JavaScript with types.' Learn patterns with 3 levels of explanation: Like You're 3, Like You're My Boss, Like You're My Girlfriend. Discriminated Unions, Branded Types, Const Assertions, and more!
React Performance: From 2.5s to 180ms Load Time
Real-world optimization techniques that reduced my portfolio's load time by 93%. Code splitting, lazy loading, image optimization, and more.
Mobile Performance: From 3.1s to 1.5s Load Time (Lighthouse 98/100)
Complete mobile performance optimization journey with real metrics. CSS optimization, font self-hosting, code splitting, and analytics deferral that doubled performance.
TypeScript Patterns That Actually Make Code Better
Beyond basic types - discriminated unions, branded types, and advanced patterns that prevent bugs before they happen. Real examples from production code.
Google OAuth Production: The PKCE Puzzle Nobody Tells You About
Why your OAuth works locally but returns 400 Bad Request in production. The PKCE configuration gotcha that costs hours of debugging.
Debugging OAuth in Production: When Google Authentication Mysteriously Fails
OAuth worked perfectly locally but failed silently in production. Here's the debugging journey that uncovered a cascade of configuration issues.
React Bundling Nightmare: How Terser Nearly Killed My Production App
'Cannot read properties of undefined (reading ReactCurrentDispatcher)' - The production mystery where aggressive minification corrupted React's internals. Here's how to fix it.
Building a Real-Time Notification System with Supabase in 2 Hours
From database triggers to React UI with real-time subscriptions. Complete implementation of likes, comments, and notification bell with unread badges.
Storytelling as Product Design: The Night of Whispers Series
Teaching through emotion, not lecture. A learning-focused reflection on how The Night of Whispers teaches attachment theory by feeling, not telling.
More articles coming soon. Follow the journey on GitHub