April 14, 2026

Dev Notes

Won’t Be Missing the Dapper Dans this Time!

I created an A-list app for ‘B-tier’ acts at Disney. It’s hard to dig down deep into the official Disneyland app to find times for the smaller acts, especially when someone might be spurring you on to the next Lightning Lane. I jest by the way….The Dapper Dans are nobody’s B-tier, and the Main Street[…]

April 6, 2026

Dev Notes

Shipping Code in 12 Minutes: How HeavyDeets deploys to AWS

HeavyDeets is in testing – meaning I’m letting people create accounts and hit it. One of the things I wanted for HeavyDeets was a clean deploy pipeline — the kind where merging a PR is the last manual step and everything else just happens. Here’s the setup we landed on for the API, built on[…]

March 31, 2026

Dev Notes

HeavyDeets – From Mine to Ours

HeavyDeets started as a personal thing. I’m tired of constantly being sold to. I’m tired of people owning and selling my data. So, I built my own tracker and self-hosted it. It worked fine for me. SQLite, Docker, done….but I wasn’t done. I wanted to access it on the LAN so I converted the self-hosted[…]

March 26, 2026

Dev Notes

HeavyDeets – Self-Hosted Weight Tracker

I just want to track my weight. I don’t want to be sold to. I don’t want my data getting sent off to power some corporate whatever. I built a simple weight tracking app. I’m making it available to any self-hosters out there that might be interested. I have it deployed as part of my[…]

March 23, 2026

Normalizing the Weight Tracker DB

I’m deranged. I like normalization. Apparently (according to Claude), it can over-engineer things, but I like it. In a recent convo, I explored the pros and cons of using a db with normalized tables built for expansion versus a simple db designed for my specific use case. I have a little weight tracker app deployed[…]

December 5, 2025

Dev Notes

My 1st Devastation of 3rd-Party Reliance

The danger of third-party reliance is when changes made by the third party disrupt or devastate your app. I knew this was coming. I discovered this issue while testing the app in the third-party’s beta for the new release. It still hurts. RIP Logi. 🙁 Logi is essentially a file parser that reads a log[…]

October 17, 2025

Dev Notes

Logi – User Friendly and Silent Updating Flow

One of the top priorities I have when building something is building with the user in mind. GitHub repo: OMTut/Logi That’s a nice thing to say, but I keep it as a priority. I try to establish the core responsibility of the app and then shift into usability. If the user has to actively check for[…]

October 7, 2025

Dev Notes

Logi – Desktop

This is the start of a journal into my development of a desktop app called Logi. It’s an overlay file parser. It reads a log file, filters for specific tags, and displays the desired info in real time. GitHub repo: OMTut/Logi Background During my senior year, I had an interview where a concern was expressed[…]

August 7, 2025

Factory Pattern for Testing Roles

I wanted to dig into the Factory pattern a bit. I was fighting the thought that conceptually, it’s just a class with methods, but that’s not entirely right. I think what I’m settling into is thinking of it as an object that has purpose. It’s not modeling something. It’s creating. It’s using a model, and[…]

July 30, 2025

Dev Notes

Automating the Backend Testing and Startup for Project Naja

I’m working on a project called Naja. It’s a full-stack app using a PostgreSQL database. Each time I work on it, I cd to the frontend directory, npm run dev, then cd into the api directory, run the tests and start the server. I want to start automating this…or at least streamline it. I asked[…]

Dev Notes

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