What I learn while building with AI, shipping real tools, and putting them to work.
No more cheesy fingers: I gave the queso jar a twist-up base
A deodorant-stick-style idea for keeping dip at the rim - and what it took to turn a snack-time joke into an honest functional concept.
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- 9 min read
Designers are becoming technical
SVGs are coordinates and instructions, not fixed images. LLMs give designers a new way to inspect, manipulate, and animate that underlying system themselves.
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- 5 min read
The component registry came from the backyard
Thirteen UI components, extracted from software that ran an actual wiffle ball tournament. On why the best component libraries are byproducts, not products.
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- 4 min read
My GitHub said I shipped nothing this year
The contribution graph showed 13. The real number was 16,931. What happened in between says a lot about how building works now.
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- 3 min read
Carrying a university into the Big 12
The conference realignment stories are about TV deals. The actual work is uniforms, signage, data, and a five-city bus tour - a decade-long project disguised as an announcement.
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- 3 min read
Case study: GoBearcats OS
Building an AI-native operating system for an athletic department's fan data - Snowflake underneath, one conversational surface on top.
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- 2 min read
Case study: digitizing a 50-year Hall of Fame
Every UC Athletics Hall of Fame inductee since 1976, structured, searchable, and beautiful - built nights-and-weekends with AI tools.
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- 2 min read
In defense of over-engineering
My wiffle ball tournament has 116 database tables, two environments, and DDoS protection. This is not a confession. It's a method.
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- 3 min read
My second brain is a folder of markdown files an AI keeps for me
What an LLM-first personal knowledge base actually looks like after a year of daily use - structure, rules, and why the AI writes the notes while I ask the questions.
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- 3 min read
Starting a creative agency inside an athletic department
We merged three units into The Agency - UC Athletics' in-house creative studio. An Emmy and one College GameDay later, here's what I'd tell anyone building a team inside an institution.
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- 3 min read
Tournament day is an operations center
Thirteen fields, forty teams, one Saturday: what actually happens when the Schott Classic goes live, and why the software earns its keep between 11:30 AM and the 10:30 PM finals.
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- 3 min read
What 298 teams taught me about edge cases
Five years of wiffle ball tournaments is the best QA program I've ever run. Real users find everything - and the fix loop is the product.
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- 3 min read
Why my wiffle ball tournament has a payments platform
The Schott Classic started as a backyard game. Now it has registration, Square payments, waivers, brackets, live scoring, and umpire scheduling. This is either dedication or a diagnosis.
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- 2 min read
