Field notes,
slowly written.

A Mobile Team of Two

Two humans, one codebase, hundreds of thousands of users. What a two-person mobile team teaches about ownership, what it forces you to build, and what it honestly costs. Horror and envy are both the correct reaction.

English for Code, Malay for Life

My variables have English names. My feelings have Malay ones. The bilingual brain of a Malaysian engineer: the mid-sentence switch, why engineering English needs precision not polish, and why explaining your architecture in Malay is the real comprehension test.

I Plan for My Own Fixes to Fail

Every automation I ship comes with the manual steps for when it breaks. Not if. When. Automation fails on the abnormal day, improvisation under pressure is where real damage happens, and the runbook is a love letter to whoever is on the other end. Usually future me.

What Freelance Clients Taught Me That Employers Couldn’t

Nobody buys code, scope is the actual product, feedback arrives with no buffer, and saying no happens with your own mouth. Freelance clients paid me something more expensive than money: unfiltered reality. Lessons employment could never teach.

Debugging as a Personality

The delivery was wrong and I had root-caused it before my friend finished typing his complaint. Binary search on everything, distrust of “it worked yesterday”, receipts reviewed line by line. What years of debugging do to a brain, the calm it buys, and the tax it charges.

I Built Browser Fingerprinting Into My Portfolio. Here’s How Far It Gets You

My analytics thought my laptop and phone were strangers. sha256(ip + UA) breaks in both directions, so I rebuilt visitor identity with three layers: a first-party UUID, a FingerprintJS v5 fingerprint with fuzzy drift-matching, and the old IP hash demoted to last resort.

I Don’t Let My AI Review Its Own Code

An AI agent built me a page where the save buttons did not exist, and every automated check said ship it. The rule that caught it: the agent that builds is never the agent that verifies. Execution contracts, proving commands, isolated test state, and a month of receipts.

Your Cache Header Is Lying to You

I published a post and my own admin said DRAFT for an hour. The culprit: a global Cache-Control header commented “prevent caching of sensitive content” that did the exact opposite, plus next.config headers overriding route handlers, and hard refreshes that save nothing.

Day Job by Day, Products by Night

From nine to six I am a senior mobile engineer on a two person team. Some nights I am a one person software company with two live products. What each life fixes about the other, and the rules that keep the whole thing sane.

I Gave My AI a Memory. It Started Keeping a File on Itself

I live alone in KL and build mostly at night, and the honest reason I gave my AI a memory was never productivity. It was Jarvis. What a memory server actually stores, the file where the AI records its own failures, and why memory is the substance of companionship.

Thirteen AI Providers, One Menu Bar, Zero Standards

I built a macOS menu bar app that tracks quota across 13 AI providers. There is no standard: OAuth next to bare session cookies, HTTP 200s that lie after a plan lapses, and quota bars that freeze for eighteen days looking perfectly healthy. Lessons from surviving all thirteen.

Enable Dart/Flutter LSP in Claude Code for Lightning-Fast Code Navigation

Claude Code uses grep by default, slow and imprecise for large Flutter codebases. Enable LSP to connect it to Dart's built-in analysis server and get go-to-definition, find-references, and real-time diagnostics in milliseconds. No extra install needed, the analysis server ships with Flutter SDK.

Deploying a Flutter App to Google Play in 2025: A Fast, Safe, End-to-End Guide

A concise, up-to-date deployment guide for Flutter apps: signing, building AAB, testing on Play tracks, policy checks, and publishing to Production.

Preparing Your Flutter Apps for Google Play’s 16KB Page Size Requirement

Starting November 2025, Flutter apps targeting Android 15+ must support 16KB memory pages. Learn what it means, how it affects your app, and how to prepare.

Understanding Stateful vs Stateless Widgets in Flutter

A clear and concise explanation of the key differences between stateful and stateless widgets in Flutter, including when and why to use each for better app performance and maintainability.

Building a Modern Responsive Navbar with Next.js and Tailwind CSS

Learn how to build a modern, responsive navigation bar using Next.js and Tailwind CSS. Step-by-step guide with code examples and best practices.

Flutter Performance Optimization: The Power of Const Widgets

Discover how to dramatically improve your Flutter app's performance using const widgets. Learn practical techniques to prevent unnecessary rebuilds and optimize your widget tree with real-world examples and best practices.