Blog

How we built Solo Vault with FastAPI, Redis, S3, pgvector, progress events, and an AWS path for production indexing.

Building a fully local macOS voice dictation app with C++, whisper.cpp, and a Swift menu bar shell — no cloud APIs, no subscriptions, sub-second transcription on Apple Silicon.

How I structured OpenClaw across Slack and Telegram so each bot had a clear job: coding workflows in one place, quick personal workflows in another, and just enough separation to keep the system useful without turning it into chaos.

How I built a sliding panel AI assistant that knows everything about me — from command palette to resizable sidebar, Gemini to Claude, and the UX details that made it actually useful.

How I built a Chrome extension that auto-fills personalized connection requests on LinkedIn — and what I learned about DOM scraping, over-engineering, and building tools you actually use.

Solo IDE won Best UI/UX and a $500 prize at the 2026 Startup Week Buildathon. The win came from a real design system — OKLCH colors, shadows over borders, and a 24-file light mode audit at 2am — not from luck.

Taking an existing Rust/Tauri IDE codebase and turning it into a demo-ready product in 72 hours. The sidecar swap, the credential vault, the session isolation bug, and what I learned about brownfield hackathons.

How 20 lines of XML in a system prompt transformed AI-generated frontends from cookie-cutter templates into genuinely distinctive designs. The prompt engineering behind Solo IDE.

Integrating ElevenLabs realtime STT into a Tauri desktop app through a Rust WebSocket proxy. What I learned about sample rate mismatches, tracing filter gotchas, and why reading API docs carefully is not optional.

Building a serverless dining concierge with S3, API Gateway, Lambda, Lex, SQS, DynamoDB, OpenSearch, SES, EventBridge, and IAM — and the session bugs, pagination walls, and billing traps I hit along the way.

A custom Claude Code command — a single markdown file — that reads git history across any repo and generates a portfolio-ready blog post. Here is how it works and why encoding your process into a prompt is more powerful than it sounds.

Three Claude Code skills that changed how I build — UI/UX Pro Max for design, Mintlify for docs, and Vercel Web Guidelines for code review.

Building Solo IDE — a Tauri 2 desktop app with a Rust backend, Node.js sidecar for the Claude Agent SDK, and React frontend. Uses your existing Claude subscription via OAuth instead of pay-per-token API keys.

Introducing this blog — a space for engineering notes, open-source learnings, and things I build.