Writing
Notes worth keeping.
Essays on systems I build and lessons I don't want to re-learn.
- Essay
Agent skills field guide: what to use, where to find them, what to build
Anatomy of an agent skill, a checklist mapping tasks to skills from a real inventory, how local skills compare to Claude conventions, and which custom skills are worth building.
- Essay
I Let the Browser Award XP. That Was a Mistake.
The data-eng-mastery app once trusted Priya's browser to award experience points. Browsers can lie. The story of BUG-017: what I assumed, what broke, and why the server owns rewards now.
- Essay
Two Codebases, One Argument: The Dashboard 500 and the Drift Behind It
A dashboard that 500'd on every load, practice feedback showing blanks, a leaderboard that couldn't count — eight contract-drift sites in data-eng-mastery, one missing guardrail.
- Essay
The First Customer Crashed Checkout: Five Paths Nobody Ever Ran
A NameError on first subscription, a GDPR delete that selected instead of deleting, a fake export URL, a missing exam column — data-eng-mastery's unexecuted paths, fixed and one still open.
- Essay
Green Tests, Red Services: The Suite Passed and the Backend Still Disagreed
Eighteen failing tests fixed to 86/86 in data-eng-mastery — and the service-layer drift the suite didn't catch: stale columns, duplicate SM-2 math, a canonical module nobody calls.
- Essay
Nobody Could Log In: Four Bugs Wearing a Trenchcoat
Tokens that were always null, a guard that bounced everyone, a login body that serialized to '{}', and a refresh flow that never fired — the data-eng-mastery auth saga.
- Essay
The Plan Said Done: A Hardening That Exists Mostly as Checkmarks
A leaked API key still in config, token hardening absent from every branch, pipeline stubs reporting zeros — and the untracked plan file that marks them all done.
- Essay
Two Writes That Silently Discarded You
A password change that toasted success and changed nothing, and study sessions that saved zeros — data-eng-mastery's silent-write failures (BUG-006, BUG-008).
- Essay
Postgres for everything: rows, vectors, and text in one store
Implement hybrid content search without new infrastructure: one similarity query, the dimension contract, and an honest split criterion.
- Essay
FastAPI in production: three afternoons to boring reliability
Move one write server-side, enforce layers with tests, install CI gates — each step grounded in real code from a learning-platform backend.
- Essay
I inventoried 80 projects on my own hard drive
How an exclusion-first PowerShell scanner, deterministic scoring, and honest caveats turned 300 GB of accumulated side projects into a triage-able inventory.