Blog

Writing

Notes on things I build — the decisions, trade-offs, and the parts that didn’t work the first time.

September 2026 · 9 min read

NyotaNow: what broke while building invitations for Indian families

An invitation should be a link, not a picture. Building that turned into a font-size rounding bug that scrambled Hindi titles, a preview renderer that cannot shape Devanagari, and a deploy setting that would have failed on the first invite — plus the unglamorous work that followed launch.

August 2026 · 8 min read

Building Cronbell: a dead-man’s-switch monitor for cron jobs

Why "did the job actually run?" is a harder question than it sounds, how I built a monitoring service around the answer, and what happened when GitHub’s scheduler turned out to be too unreliable to trigger it — FastAPI, Neon, and a Fly.io deploy built to sleep between checks.