Work — write-ups
Write-ups of shipped products, aimed at the decisions rather than the screenshots. Each one covers what the constraint was, what it cost, and what it would be a stretch to claim was proven. Where the thing is running, it is linked — and using it is a better read than any of this.
constraint · cost · what stays unproven
01 / STARTER KIT · SPRING BOOT
A Spring Boot starter for the half of a PayFast integration that actually breaks: three different signature rules, idempotency as a database constraint, retries that survive a rollback, and the webhook that never arrives.
02 / TEMPLATE · ASTRO
A personal-site template with nothing in its script budget — Astro, plain CSS, WCAG AA, and one flag that keeps a site out of search until launch. Extracted from this one.
03 / GAME · TYPESCRIPT · CANVAS
A real-time node-capture strategy game against AI rivals, with a twenty-level campaign and saved progress — playable from the keyboard alone, in a genre that almost never is.
04 / APP · KOTLIN · NEXT.JS
A self-hosted read-later app in Kotlin and Next.js, where one cookie requirement decided the whole deployment — plus a fetcher that treats every saved URL as hostile, and what a passing test cannot tell you about a session.
05 / DEMO · ASTRO · REACT
A public walk through a South African payments integration — onboarding, what actually gets signed, the webhook that never arrives, and a dashboard where money is integer cents the whole way through.
A portfolio that only shows finished screens is showing you the easy half.
The interesting part of any build is the set of decisions taken under a constraint — what got traded away, what turned out to be wrong later, what the number actually was once it was measured rather than estimated. That is what these are about.
So they are deliberately specific, and they include the parts that did not go cleanly. For anyone weighing up the work — whatever they are weighing it up for — this is a more honest sample than a list of technologies, and the product itself is a better one still.
Something here close to what you're building?