Writing

Engineering deep-dives and build retrospectives, published on Medium.

01Apr 11, 2026

I Built a Multiplayer Word Game Because I Was Bored (And It Completely Broke My Brain)

A deep dive into the engineering realities of building Word Clash — a real-time competitive multiplayer word game. Covers the deliberately stateless "no-database" server architecture, the two-pass Wordle duplicate-letter algorithm, WebSocket reconnection with 30-second grace windows, dictionary tiering (1,500 common targets vs 10,000+ obscure validation words), and decoupling UI timers from network state to eliminate jitter.

02Jul 23, 2025

Building tinyPath: My Journey Creating a Full-Stack URL Shortener from Scratch

A comprehensive retrospective on building a production-ready full-stack application. Covers strategic tech stack decisions — TanStack Router for type-safe routing, Redux Toolkit for scalable state — along with stateless JWT auth, bcrypt hashing, httpOnly cookies for XSS prevention, collision-resistant nanoid short codes, and the deployment hurdles of taking an app from localhost to Vercel + Railway.