Take-Home Assignments That Don’t Waste People’s Time
I’ve been on both sides. The good ones share scope, time boxes, and a clear rubric.
Blog
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The Day CSS Layout Stopped Feeling Like Magic
Flexbox for one axis, Grid for two — and the mental model that unblocked me.
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How I Stopped Procrastinating on My Own Blog
I got tired of never publishing. So I wired WhatsApp → n8n → GitHub and made posting as easy as texting a friend.
I Let AI Draft My Posts — Here’s What Still Feels ‘Mine’
The model doesn’t have my job stories, my bad deploys, or my taste. I use it anyway — just not the way the Twitter takes suggest.
I Replaced a Bunch of Cron Scripts with n8n (And Sleep Better)
n8n looks like a toy until you’re debugging a 2 a.m. webhook. Here’s how I use it for real work — including this blog’s publish pipeline.
I Banned Stack Overflow for a Week (Here’s What I Used Instead)
Docs, source, and rubber duck — not virtue, just a forced reset.
Why I Still Route Some Alerts Through Email
Slack is loud. PagerDuty is serious. Email is the boring pipe that never left.
Vim, VS Code, and the Religion I’m Not Joining
I’ve switched editors three times. The only thing that moved the needle was learning my debugger.
Three API Mistakes I’ve Shipped (So Maybe You Won’t)
Versioning, pagination, and the boolean that meant three different things.
How I Read a Codebase I Didn’t Write (Without Pretending I’m a Genius)
A repeatable order of operations: entrypoints, data flow, then opinions.
My Boring Vercel Deploy Checklist (Copy-Paste Friendly)
The stuff I verify before telling a client ‘it’s live’ — env vars, redirects, and the OG image that wasn’t.
Structured Logs vs. Print Statements: A Weekend I’ll Never Get Back
One outage taught me why JSON logs and correlation IDs aren’t resume fluff.
I Removed a Popular Library and Nothing Broke (At First)
How I knew it was dependency bloat, not ‘best practice,’ keeping it around.
I Rewrote a 200-Line Python Script in Rust (Was It Worth It?)
Honest post-mortem: speed, DX, and the moment I missed dicts more than I expected.
Five Git Habits I Stole From Better Engineers
None of these are flashy. That’s why they survived my laziness.
The Migration That Was 'Just Adding a Column'
Spoiler: it wasn’t. A Postgres story about locks, bad timing, and the one checklist item I skipped.