Engineering notes
First-person retrospectives on personal projects and freelance work — RAG, vector databases, DuckDB, neo-brutalist UI, and the occasional opinion.
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· 7 min read
How I built aelm.dev: neo-brutalism, react-snap, and a GEO-first stack
A first-person retrospective on shipping a single-page portfolio engineered for AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude) and Google alike — without Next.js or Astro.
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· 8 min read
Why I picked Ollama + LanceDB + FastAPI for the AI Book Recommender
A small RAG project that runs entirely on a laptop. Notes on choosing local LLMs over OpenAI, embedded vector stores over Qdrant, and shipping in a weekend.
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· 6 min read
DuckDB for real-time dashboards: lessons from World Data Visualizer
Sub-100 ms queries on multi-million-row aggregates with zero ops overhead. Why DuckDB beat Postgres for a read-heavy market intelligence dashboard.
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· 7 min read
Building AirAlert: an honest air-quality monitor with an Arduino UNO and three sensors that disagree
BME680, MQ-135, and MH-Z19 do not measure the same thing — and treating them as if they did is how most hobby air-quality projects lie to you. Here is what I actually trust.
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· 6 min read
Mood Tracker: one slider per day, Supabase RLS, and the discipline of not shipping features
A tracking app that asks you a single 1–10 question. Notes on Supabase Row-Level Security, PWA install prompts, and why streaks are honest tools or engagement bait depending on how you build them.
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· 6 min read
Boîte à Livre: mapping free neighborhood libraries with Leaflet, OpenStreetMap, and Firebase
A community map of little free libraries in France. Notes on choosing Leaflet over Mapbox, why Firebase Realtime Database still has a niche, and the moderation problem you cannot avoid.
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· 7 min read
MobiPA: building an inclusive ride-sharing app for a French village, in Flutter
Capstone project for the city council of La Mure: connecting elderly and disabled residents with municipal staff for assisted mobility. Notes on designing for low-tech users, why Flutter, and what 'client work for a town hall' actually looks like.
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· 6 min read
LogGPX: an Android GPS tracker for ski touring, in Java, before I knew about Kotlin
An Android app I built for ski-touring traces in 2020. Notes on parsing GPX, why GPS altitude is a lie, the battery cost of high-frequency sampling, and what I would build differently five years later.