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Engineering Notes

Deep dives, learnings, & technical logs

2026-05-187 min read

From UI/UX Designer to Full-Stack Developer — What Actually Changed

I started with Figma and design systems. Two years later I'm writing FastAPI services and PostgreSQL migrations. Here's what the transition actually looked like — the good parts and the uncomfortable ones.

careerdesign
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2026-05-154 min read

Setting up PostgreSQL and pgvector for a portfolio AI

A practical guide to configuring pgvector on a self-hosted PostgreSQL database, structuring semantic database queries, and calculating high-performance cosine similarity vector distances.

PostgreSQLDatabase
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2026-05-125 min read

What I learned migrating to Next.js App Router

A candid analysis of migrating a production portfolio to Next.js 16 (App Router) and React 19, exploring the benefits of server-side data fetching, Turbopack compiling speed, and practical strategies for solving hydration mismatches.

Next.jsReact
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2026-05-106 min read

How I built a RAG chatbot with FastAPI and Gemini

A complete deep-dive into building a production-ready, low-latency Retrieval-Augmented Generation chatbot from scratch using sentence-transformers, PostgreSQL asyncpg connection pooling, and Gemini.

AIPython
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2026-04-058 min read

Building a RAG Chatbot — The Parts the Tutorials Skip

Most RAG tutorials show the happy path. Here's what actually happens when you build one for production — the rate limits, the embedding cold starts, the hallucinations, and how I handled all of it.

pythonai
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2026-02-285 min read

JWT Auth Started Failing in Production — It Was Supabase Key Rotation

Users were getting logged out randomly and API calls were returning 401s. The cause took 2 hours to find and 5 minutes to fix.

supabaseauth
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2026-01-106 min read

Why I Moved My Backend Off Shared Hosting (And What Broke)

Shared hosting looked cheaper until the firewall started blocking outbound API calls. Here's the full migration story and everything that broke along the way.

devopsrender
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2025-11-207 min read

How I Fixed Mixed Nameservers and DNS Propagation Hell

The exact steps I took to untangle a broken multi-provider DNS setup that was causing intermittent 404s and SSL errors in production.

devopsdns
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