Notes
Open Archive
Half-formed ideas, lessons from the trenches, and the occasional rant. Writing to think, not to publish.
Why I built Gora. AI accelerated the code. Marketing was the real challenge.
AI helped me build Gora faster than any product before it. The real challenge began after launch: earning trust and building density inside a global but deeply local climbing community.
I finally built Rock Climbing Portugal. I never wrote a single line of code.
Every independent developer has one of these. The side project that is always "next month." You sketch the schema on a napkin, buy the domain, set up the repo, and then a client calls and the whole thing goes back in the drawer.
The Rise of the AI Orchestrator: Why the Generalist is King
In the current technological landscape, the "specialist" trap is becoming a liability. As AI continues to commoditize syntax and boilerplate code, the true value of an engineer has shifted from how to write a function to what systems should be built and how they connect.
The Agentic Revolution: How Engineering Teams Build Differently Now
The way we build software has fundamentally changed. Not incrementally, fundamentally. And most engineering organizations are still catching up.
What Rock Climbing Taught Me About Software Architecture
Hanging 20 meters up a rock face, scared, unsure if the next move will hold, this is where I learned the most important lessons about building software systems. Here's what the vertical world taught me about engineering.
I Built a Virtual DOM Before React Existed (And Nobody Cared)
In 2012, I created a JSON based virtual DOM system. A year later, React launched with the exact same concept. Here's why being first doesn't matter.
DRY in the Age of AI and Tailwind CSS: A Modern Guide
The DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle has been a cornerstone of software engineering for decades. However, the rise of Tailwind CSS, which encourages "utility first" styles, and AI powered coding assistants, which make copy pasting code effortless, has sparked a debate: Is DRY dead, or has it just evolved?
What a Decade of Product Engineering Taught Me
In 2013, I co founded Bondlayer, a visual platform for building websites and mobile apps without code. Here's what building a SaaS platform for a decade taught me about technology, business, and what really matters.
JAMstack for Mobile Apps: Why Serve JSON Instead of Building APIs
I built festival apps serving thousands of concurrent users. No backend APIs. No servers melting down. Just pre generated JSON files and 'islands' of dynamic content. Here's how JAMstack thinking changed mobile development for us.