Tag: Reality Check

• Deep in cryptography (and three rewrites that broke momentum)

  Jun 26, 2025 · 8 min

  How I went from payment portal optimization to reverse-engineering libsodium, discovered an easter egg in build output, and learned that technical mastery means nothing when management has no direction.

• The perfect solution that never shipped (and learning to work with legends)

  Apr 22, 2025 · 6 min

  I built a flawless gasless onboarding system with OpenZeppelin Defender and Cloudflare Workers. It was praised in reviews yet never saw production. This is the story of startup priorities and working with a Clint Eastwood developer.