Writing

The App Router Lessons I Wish I'd Known on Day One

Six months in Next.js's App Router and a handful of things I'd do differently. Real patterns, real mistakes, and what I'd tell my past self before the first commit.

What Nobody Tells You About Building a RAG Pipeline in Production

Most RAG tutorials stop at 'use a vector DB and retrieve top-k chunks.' Here's what actually breaks when real users start typing — and the cheap fixes that move the needle.

Why I Stopped Reaching for useEffect (And You Probably Should Too)

Most useEffect calls in modern React are mistakes. Here's the mental model I use now — when to skip it, what to replace it with, and the one question that catches half of them.