Tag Archives: technology

AI, Chrome, webdev

Transforming Recipe Chaos with SeasonApp

Some projects start with ambition.

This one started with annoyance.

I was tired of juggling recipes across bookmarks, screenshots, messages, and the occasional scribble in a notes app.
A normal person would’ve organized things.
I opened Cursor.

The plan was simple: a quick weekend hack.
Nothing serious. Just a tiny tool to help me stop losing recipes.

But then it worked. And I liked using it.
Then I showed it to a couple of friends.
Then my family started using it.
Then those friends shared it with their friends.

That’s when the “weekend hack” quietly transformed into SeasonApp—a small but mighty full-stack platform for cooking, powered by AI and built to remove friction from the kitchen.

Why SeasonApp Exists

If you cook regularly, your digital life eventually turns into a disorganized pantry. Tabs everywhere. Screenshots mixed with flight confirmations. Recipe blogs where you scroll past a childhood memoir before finding the ingredient list. And once you finally want to cook something, you can’t find the right recipe—or you’re missing one ingredient and the whole plan collapses.

SeasonApp brings order to that chaos.

It gives recipes a home.
It helps you create new ones.
And it actually understands what you want to do with whatever’s in your fridge.

The more people around me used it, the more obvious the need felt.
Everyone had the same pain; they just tolerated it.
SeasonApp gives them a better way.

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Business

Protect Your Digital Life: 3 Key Security Habits

We imagine hackers as trench-coat wizards hammering keyboards while green code rains down the screen.
Reality is less Matrix and more lazy cat burglar.

They don’t “hack in.”

They log in, using the same password you used for LinkedIn in 2014 and also for your Gmail, bank, gym, YMCA portal, and that meditation app you opened (only) once.

Let’s fix that.
It’s not hard but it’s important.

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AI

Gemini 3: Your New AI Coding Assistant

Every developer has that moment where they stare at the screen and wish for a magic wand.
Something that can unscramble a legacy codebase, sketch a UI without endless Figma tabs, or summarize a 300-page API doc that reads like… and create some good tests out of nothing.

Google just dropped something dangerously close.

Gemini 3 isn’t another “slightly better benchmark” release. It’s a real step forward—especially for people who build things for a living.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

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AI, webdev

8 Top Tips to Actually Use Cursor (Without Setting Your Wallet on Fire)

TL;DR

Open a new agent/chat for each new request or task, instead of continuing everything in one long conversation.

Keeping unrelated work in a single long chat makes the agent less efficient, increases context noise, and also becomes more expensive because the full conversation history keeps getting processed.

Best practice:

  • One request / task = one new agent
  • Keep chats focused on a single issue or feature
  • Start a fresh chat when switching topics
  • If you can –> Combine Cursor with Ollama + local models

If you’ve been coding anytime in the past year, you’ve probably heard the buzz about Cursor — the AI-powered IDE that promises to write your code, clean your code, and maybe even refactor your soul.

It’s built on top of VS Code, so it feels instantly familiar.
But the moment you hit that shiny AI shortcut, you realize: this thing is smarter than your codebase and hungrier than your wallet.

After a few months of using Cursor — and after accidentally vaporizing a scandalous number of API tokens — I’ve learned how to stay productive and solvent.


And yes, the TL;DR is that you can still combine Cursor with Ollama + local models to get many of these benefits for free.
Here are my 8 hard-earned tips to make Cursor your loyal sidekick within the limits of your budget.

The #1 tip: Control context scope aggressively – This is the biggest win

Cursor auto-includes files, diffs, and history—this explodes token usage.

Do this:

  • Manually select only the exact files/functions needed
  • Avoid “entire repo” context unless absolutely required
  • Use @file and @selection instead of implicit context
  • Clear chat or start a new thread when switching tasks

Why it matters:
Token cost scales with every line in context, not just your prompt.

Below are a bit more tips:

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Chrome, JavaScript, webdev

Building a Real-Time Pull-Up Tracker: How I Taught The Browser to Count Our Pain

It started as a simple idea my son brought up: Can we make a web app that counts our pull-ups during our pull-up games?

Turns out, teaching a machine to recognize human suffering is both hilarious and complicated.
What began as a “let’s make a quick pull-ups app” spiraled into an intense journey through computer vision, browser quirks, and a few accidental infinite loops that made our laptop sound like a jet engine.

The “Simple” Goal

I wanted to automatically count pull-ups using a web camera.

Easy, right?

Just detect a human, see when they go up and down, and count.

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Business, life

Nine Mental Models to Stop You from Making Dumb Decisions

We all think we’re rational.

We’re not.

Most of the time, most of the people are just apes with phones making pattern-matching errors at scale. If you aren’t sure, just look around.

Shane Parrish’s The Great Mental Models, is a antidote — a toolkit for thinking clearly and making fewer stupid decisions. Hopefully.

Btw, I wrote about it in the past as I ‘took’ ideas from the great Charlie Munger:

Charlie’s Thoughts on Decision Making

Below are nine models I keep coming back to, rephrased for the real world (and with fewer academic eyebrows raised).

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cloud, webdev

5 Essential Security Moves Every Startup & SMB Must Make to Prevent Cyber Attacks

If you’re working at a startup or SMB, you might think “we’re too small to be targeted.” You might believe that cyber attackers only go after Fortune 500 companies with deep pockets and valuable data worth millions.

That assumption could destroy your business.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: attackers don’t discriminate by company size.
They discriminate by vulnerability.
And right now, small and medium-sized businesses represent the softest, most lucrative targets in the entire threat landscape.

Here are the top 5 things you should do.
Right now.

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cloud, Design, JavaScript, webdev

Building Resilient Microservices for Bootstrapped Apps 🏃🏼‍♀️🚵🏼

Out on the trail, your phone isn’t plugged into a wall. Every network ping drains battery. Every background process steals CPU cycles that could keep your GPS running for another hour.

In my previous post on the GPX Water Mapper, we explored visualizing water sources along your route. Now we’re going under the hood: designing a microservices architecture that respects the constraints of outdoor apps—where a dead battery isn’t just inconvenient, it’s potentially dangerous.

Imagine getting a real-time hydration alert as you approach mile 12 of your desert bike ride, calculated from your current pace, the temperature, and known water sources ahead.
All while using less battery than a typical podcast app.

What we’ll build:

  • A microservices approach that actually makes sense for small teams
    (spoiler: not everything needs to be a service – moreover, in many cases you should avoid it and run on a monolith)
  • Event-driven patterns that keep your app responsive without constant polling
  • Node.js implementations you can deploy on minimal infrastructure
  • Real-world trade-offs: when to split services and when a monolith wins
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Business

10 Startup Lessons from David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity

David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity isn’t a business book. It’s a bold meditation on science, philosophy, and human progress. But buried in its pages are principles that can reshape how startup leaders think about building companies, products, and cultures.

Startups are problem-solving machines.
Problems never stop coming; solutions never stop creating new challenges. That cycle is the essence of growth. Deutsch gives us a framework for seeing this not as a burden, but as the path to infinity.

Here are ten core lessons from the book, translated into practical guidance for startup leadership, with examples of how a CTO might put them into action.

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Business, webdev

Scaling Engineering Teams: Lessons from Google, Facebook, and Netflix

After spending over a decade in engineering leadership roles at some of the world’s most chaotic innovation factories—Google, Facebook, and Netflix—I’ve learned one universal truth: scaling engineering teams is like raising teenagers. They grow fast, develop personalities of their own, and if you don’t set boundaries, suddenly they’re setting the house on fire at 3am.

The difference between teams that thrive at scale and those that collapse into Slack-thread anarchy typically comes down to three key factors:

  • Structured goal-setting
  • A ruthless focus on code quality
  • Intentional culture building

Let me share some lessons I learned from scaling teams at Google, Facebook, and Netflix. Here are a few frameworks, metrics, and tools that actually work when you’re trying to scale from 10 to 100 to 1,000+ engineers—without losing your mind or your best people.

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