Blog
Hackathon stories, internship lessons, and notes from building in public.
My University Runs Their LMS on AWS. It Still Crashes Under a Few Hundred Students. (Part 1: The Autopsy)
---
I Tried to Predict Google's Random Number Generator So I Wouldn't Have to Study
Three hours before my Design and Analysis of Algorithms lab exam, I made a decision.
Serving Tenant-Specific Content from a Single Global Deployment
Most multi-tenant SaaS systems start life in a silo model. Each enterprise customer gets their own deployment, their own subdomain, usually their own backend, and a routing story so obvious nobody even calls it routing.
Saathi: Building an AI App for People Who Still Use Button Phones
The hard part of Saathi wasn't getting an LLM to answer questions. The hard part was refusing to build the kind of AI app developers love making for each other.
6 Hours of Programming, 18 Hours of Everything Else
We filmed the product ad before the product fully worked. That probably sounds backwards if your mental image of a hackathon is 4 people hammering at keyboards and pretending caffeine is a personality trait. It was backwards. It was also the right call.
Inside YC Startup School: Decoding the Silicon Valley Playbook
The combined net worth in that room was probably somewhere in the tens of billions of dollars, and I was sitting in one of the chairs.
Spectre Hackathon: Neo AI
I'll be honest about how this hackathon started. Our first plan was to find an existing open-source local AI app, polish the interface, and present it as our own. Plagiarism with a fresh UI.
HEAL-A-Thon at PESU: 6 Hours to Impact
By the time I showed up at PESU for the HEAL-A-Thon, six-hour hackathons didn't intimidate me. I'd been building and shipping production systems for months. Tight deadlines were routine. I had a solid handle on agentic AI workflows and enough experience to know exactly how far I could push a short sprint.
Iotopia: Bridging Hardware and Software
My second hackathon started with confidence the first one never had. I'd spent months as a product development intern at ArkVerse by that point. Built real things for real users, shipped them, learned from the wreckage. I knew how to approach a 24-hour sprint. Scope aggressively. Build fast. Don't waste time on anything that won't show up in the demo.
From ArkVerse to CoComply: My 8-Month Evolution
At ThirdStartup, nobody held your hand. A client needed a landing page, you built it from the ground up. A product needed a dashboard, you owned every screen. Requirements to deployment, every feature was your responsibility, and when something broke in production, that was your problem to fix.
24 Hours of FSDC: Building Under Pressure
At 3 AM, twelve hours into my first hackathon, I was debugging a Supabase Row Level Security error I couldn't parse. I didn't know what RLS was six hours earlier. My teammates had given up and were face-down on their laptops.
Contact Me
If the portfolio, experiments, or open-source work have been useful, you can support the work here.