Welcome to my blog. I write about building software, exploring systems, and learning in public. Expect posts on Swift, CI/CD, architecture, side projects, and personal reflections from whatever I'm working through.
Nothing like a silent failure to remind you what the product actually is: emails leaving the building. When booking emails were no longer sent, I avoided the rewrite fantasy. I migrated SMTP, added OAuth token fetch and refresh, pulled the system into a repo with Docker Compose dev parity, and added health checks that page me when it breaks. Legacy systems don’t need drama. They need boring reliability.
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I wanted blog subscriptions, not a new SaaS project. So I used OneSignal for email + push and wired notifications into CI using frontmatter dates. No backend. No user table. No admin UI. The best system is the one you stop thinking about.
Feedback did not just polish my thesis. It changed the framework early on, and later changed how that framework had to be written.
I used to chase outcomes: perfection, being "done", traction. Now I try to ship experiments instead: small, real slices I can evaluate and iterate on. Outcomes are noisy. Shipping is controllable.
How I turned months of building Vigil into a thesis that can survive being read, by writing in phases, using ChatGPT for early drafts, and treating case studies as pressure tests rather than proof.
I stopped trying to stay motivated to learn Finnish and started designing the system around it. Once exposure, retrieval, and feedback had defaults, progress became boring and reliable.
How a fuzzy thesis topic turned into a framework I could actually run.
How Orthodox Jewish migrants fleeing tsarist Russia became trapped between disease, politics, and transatlantic power struggles.
After travel and transitions, I’m returning to a few simple basics that make everyday life feel manageable again.
Coming home doesn’t always mean arriving. Sometimes it just means restarting.
Returning to work is less about tasks and more about re-establishing orientation, especially when systems keep drifting.
Why I still set goals, but rely on systems, reflection, and consistency to carry the year.
A short reflection on slowing down without dropping my routines over the holidays.
A brief look at how a vague interest turned into a concrete research direction.
A short reflection on a semester that changed more than I expected.
A reflection on picking up a language that first felt impossible.
A look back at building a small Firebase-powered MVP.
Two months in Finland, finding calm after a fast start.
When convenience tools become inconvenient.
Looking back at my journey as I turn 25.
Enforcing a consistent style for initializing optional variables in SwiftLint.
A journey from complexity to simplicity in building a collaborative anagrams game.
Reflecting on my experiences and growth during the summer semester.
A full-stack social platform for students, developed in a five-person team during my exchange semester in New Zealand.
Smokes used to use a Swift backend hosted on AWS. Here’s why we replaced it with Vercel.
Isolated, reproducible, and clean environments for modern development.
A retrospective on building and rebuilding one of my first iOS apps.
Saving money, gaining analytics, and smoothing out the rough edges.
How a small smoking tracker app turned into a published SwiftUI project, and what I learned from it.
A journey through creating my personal website using Astro.
Notes on building things, staying steady, and figuring it out along the way