Notes from building.
Things I worked out the expensive way and wrote down so I would not have to work them out again.
~/logs --by-date
§V · 05 ENTRIESThey were reconciling payments with a printout and a pen
A pharma wholesaler matched every incoming payment by hand, on paper. I built them a desktop app that reads any Indian bank statement and does it locally, because the data was never going to be allowed to leave the building.
I explained the architecture badly and my team built the wrong thing
The first time I led a team, my worst mistake wasn't technical. I described an architecture that was clear in my own head and assumed that was the same as having communicated it.
I chose bare React Native on purpose, and I'd choose differently now
In 2023 Expo couldn't do the native work an2 cabs needed, so I went bare. Three years on I'm shipping two Expo apps. What changed wasn't my reasoning, it was the platform.
How a 30-person content workflow became an automated pipeline
Producing one exam set once occupied 30 people for a day. The first production pipeline cut that to two reviewers in under an hour; the workflow is now automated.
What being the only engineer at a startup taught me
Lessons from building two EdTech platforms solo: making architecture decisions without a review loop, shipping web and mobile, and owning production end to end.