StepSnap — I Built a Chrome Extension

I have had a very specific problem at work. Whenever I need to walk someone through a process on a web app - onboarding a new team member, handing off a workflow, writing up a process doc - I end up doing one of two things: scheduling a screen share, or spending 20 minutes stitching together screenshots in a Google Doc while writing “click here, then click there” in a way that somehow still manages to be confusing. ...

April 6, 2026 · 3 min

Roasted by my daughter!

My daughter just roasted me, and honestly, I’m impressed. She told me, “Dad, at the rate you’re watching Demon Slayer, GTA 6 will be out before you finish it.” I’m proud of her on a few levels. It was a top-tier burn-novel, well-timed, and perfectly tailored to her target audience. We both had a good laugh, but now I’m on a mission to prove her wrong. Knowing her, that was likely the goal all along.

April 6, 2026 · 1 min

Setting up a home server

For a long time, my Mac Mini was the unintended backbone of my workflow. What started as a few local workflows, soon blossomed into a workflows for emails, scheduled jobs, Home Assistant alerts etc. It’s a great machine, and it handled my daily tasks alongside a growing list of background services-MongoDB, Postgres, Redis, and n8n-without breaking a sweat. It even ran my local AI models via Ollama. But then came the “lab creep.” I started adding more: a MagicMirror instance for the family calendar, Excalidraw for diagrams, and various utility containers. ...

February 16, 2026 · 5 min

Traffic Blocking with Pi-hole and Learning about DNS

One of the frustrating thing about being online these days is the obnoxious number of ads that litter each and every website. Some of these sites are so full of ads that it’s just impossible to get to the content. Take a look at Yahoo Finance for example Yahoo Finance Half the page is an ad. There are worse offenders out there. Sites that greet you with a mess of loud, inconvenient ads before you can get to the content. It’s not just annoying; it pulls your focus away from what you came looking for in that website. ...

February 6, 2026 · 5 min

My Productivity Hack for 2026

2025 GitHub Heatmap Looking at a GitHub contribution graph is like looking at a mirror of your year. My 2025 graph tells a very specific story: a quiet first half followed by a second half that was busy, very busy. I did create a bunch of poc-xxxx repositories and frequently updated my personal projects, but the real drivers behind that green heat-map were my website updates and, most significantly, Obsidian. ...

January 5, 2026 · 2 min

Bypassing AI Guardrails

Most of us have played around with prompt engineering by now, experimenting with different ways to get an AI to do exactly what we want. It really comes down to the ‘magic words’-the specific phrases and framing that can either trigger a perfect response or leave the model confused. It’s like the difference between “Wingardium Levi-O-sa”(explode) and “Wingardium Levio-sa”(levitation) Levi-O-sa v/s Levio-sa Jailbreaking Much like finding the perfect prompt to get a high-quality result, crafting specific words or phrases can be used to navigate around an AI’s built-in guardrails - often called “jailbreaking.” It’s essentially the art of finding a loophole in the AI’s logic. These methods take advantage of the fact that human language is flexible and messy, and AI models sometimes struggle to tell the difference between a helpful instruction and a “hacker” trick. ...

December 30, 2025 · 5 min

From Zero to 10k

I have never been a runner. In fact, before this, I hadn’t run a single mile in my life. If you asked me a few months ago, I would have told you I don’t run unless something is chasing me. Despite my history as a non-runner, I stepped up to the starting line of the BMW Dallas Marathon 10k. I crossed the finish line with a time of 1:14:34 - and even managed to clock a new 5k personal record of 32:00 along the way. ...

December 24, 2025 · 6 min

30 Minutes with Gemini 3 and Google Antigravity

This is a late post. Pretty late post actually. I wrote this in November 18th. But got arount to post it only by 24th Dec. Google released Antigravity a while back (quite a while back) and this is the log of how it went for me. Background Most of my personal projects use MongoDB as the database. After a while you start to notice patterns in the way APIs are built for accessing and managing data. The next step in the evolution is to create a library that can quickly create these data APIs for you. ...

November 18, 2025 · 4 min

From "Half-Stack" to Full-Value: Owning Your Deployment Pipeline

I recently had the pleasure of speaking at the Commit Your Code conference, where I presented my talk, “The Modern Full-Stack: Owning Your Deployment Pipeline.” The core idea was to challenge our definition of what it means to be a “full-stack” developer in today’s world. For too long, we’ve defined full-stack as proficiency in front-end and back-end development. But I’d argue that this leaves a massive gap. If you write code but have no visibility or ownership over how it gets to users, you are not full-stack, you are “half-stack”. ...

October 2, 2025 · 7 min

Upgrading A Hugo Website

This website runs on Hugo and is hosted via Cloudflare Pages. The last time I wrote a post and updated this site was almost an year ago. Since then, I have been busy with the book, that I rarely got time to update this site. The book’s done, I now have time to get back to writing and maintaining this site. The first thing I had to do was to upgrade the site. ...

September 30, 2025 · 2 min