Building the Cloud Backend for Solo Vault
How we built Solo Vault with FastAPI, Redis, S3, pgvector, progress events, and an AWS path for production indexing.
Writing
Blog
Notes from building AI tools, desktop apps, cloud systems, and the occasional thing that broke badly enough to write down.
I Built My Own Wispr Flow to Stop Paying $25/Month
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 Set Up Slack and Telegram Bots for Different OpenClaw Workflows
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.
Adding an AI Chat Assistant to My Portfolio Site
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.
I Built a Chrome Extension to Stop Writing the Same LinkedIn Messages
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.
We Won Best UI/UX at the Buildathon. Here''s the Design System Behind It.
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.
Building a Native AI IDE in 3 Days — Solo at Startup Week Buildathon
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.
The System Prompts That Stop My AI Agent from Generating Ugly UIs
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.
Adding Voice Input to a Desktop App: Three Layers of Things That Can Go Wrong
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.
I Wired 10 AWS Services Together to Build a Chatbot That Emails You Restaurant Suggestions
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.
I Wrote a Markdown File That Writes My Blog Posts
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.
Claude Code Skills I Use Every Day
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.
How I Built a Desktop AI IDE That Uses Your Claude Subscription Instead of API Keys
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.
Hello World
Introducing this blog — a space for engineering notes, open-source learnings, and things I build.