From Wireframe to Full Stack: Designing Story Spinner+ in a Day
Overrated was the modest expectation—plan, plan—that eight questions and a blank TLDraw canvas would occupy the day; before it ended, the application was live.
Code Platoon
The Accumulator Pattern and Two Small Bugs That Taught Me More Than the Syntax
When the solution I knew was right failed anyway, the error message held two characters hostage and named the adversary hunting my assumptions: JavaScript.
The CLI Has No Map
That blank terminal, I opened; its cursor blinking at the upper-left corner, the screen displayed no folder, breadcrumb, or other indication of the one fact I needed:
The Loop That Wasn't
It was the loop that I had trusted through a hundred small programs, yet it received me not as one familiar but as a stranger wearing the face of a friend—the bug beneath the bug. It wasn't a logic error. It wasn't a missing edge case. It was a mental model problem I'd been hefting without knowing it, and once I saw it, everything snapped into place.
Three Patterns That Run Half of Algorithm Problems
Although I had faced these Codewars problems before, each new disguise slammed the same three doors in my face: Accumulator, Frequency Counter, and Two-Pointer. Not the same answers — the same underlying structures.
If you can recognize which one you're looking at, the problem goes from "where do I even start" to "which version of this pattern applies here."
Late to Orientation, Early to Everything Else
If Code Platoon rattled awake like a neighbor through the hotel wall, I still chose my anniversary in Las Vegas and let the program begin without me—begin without me. Not accidentally — I was in Las Vegas for my anniversary and I chose to be there fully. The calendar overlap was real, and I made a call.
I regret nothing.
The Week I Rode a Robot and Learned to Talk to One
“So this is how the future starts,” I said as I opened my computer: I had opened a laptop, I had opened a new career, and three days earlier I had opened the door to a robotaxi.