blog
Build notes
Devlogs from whatever I'm building — the decisions, the dead ends, and the parts that didn't make it into the case studies.
Why I built a joke tool instead of a "serious" app
On choosing a dumb-sounding idea on purpose, and why entertainment was the actual growth strategy for Rate My Username.
What I'd do differently with the leaderboard
The query performance problem a global leaderboard creates once real users show up, and the indexing fix that solved it.
How Rate My Username's scoring actually works
Behind the 100-point score: the four-axis rubric, the consistency problem, and what I'd redesign first.
Picking a stack to ship in a weekend, not debate for a week
Optimizing tool choices for shipping speed as a solo builder, and where I let myself slow down instead.
What actually breaks when a side project gets its first real traffic
The unglamorous list of bugs and edge cases that only showed up once real users arrived.
Designing a feature whose entire job is to be screenshotted
Notes on the GameCard export, and treating the share image itself as the main feature.