// blog
Field notes.
Notes from building and running a solo product portfolio. The mistakes get written down here so the next project skips them.
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01 My Homepage Said 35K. The Real Number Was 518K.
I replaced the hand-typed traffic badges on my site with a live pull from Cloudflare analytics. The badges added up to about 35K a month. The API came back with 518K.
- #analytics
- #cloudflare
- #solo_dev
- #data
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02 Your Privacy Policy Drifts Every Time You Ship.
Twice this year an audit caught my legal pages describing a site that no longer existed. Legal copy is documentation, and documentation rots without a re-check.
- #legal
- #privacy
- #ops
- #solo_dev
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03 The Dashboard Said Deployed. The Domain Said Nothing.
My Pages project kept deploying green while the real domain resolved to nothing. What that checkmark actually means, and the outside-in check I run on every ship now.
- #dns
- #cloudflare
- #solo_dev
- #shipping
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04 The Social Card That Refused to Render.
My site's link preview showed a gray box on X for days. The bug was an SVG, the second bug was a cache, and the diagnosis took longer than both fixes combined.
- #debugging
- #seo
- #social
- #web
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05 Flipping a Repo Public Publishes Your Whole History.
Before five of my repos went public I learned the hard way that git history is part of the release. The snapshot approach that kept old mistakes private.
- #git
- #security
- #open_source
- #solo_dev
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06 Cloudflare Runs Almost Everything I Build. Vercel Runs One Thing.
A few months of turning demos into real products, and what shipping on both Cloudflare and Vercel actually taught me about each platform.
- #cloudflare
- #vercel
- #solo_dev
- #ai_tools
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07 Two Directories and a Repository. The Data Decides What Ranks.
Two local directories and one curated repository, and the one lesson all three live or die on. The template is a weekend. The data pipeline behind every page is the whole job.
- #seo
- #directories
- #solo_dev
- #data
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08 Why I Bet on SEO and Free Tools Instead of Posting on Social Media
A solo builder's case for search-driven distribution. If you will not sustain the social media grind, do not build a business that depends on it.
- #seo
- #distribution
- #solo_dev
- #strategy
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09 I Shipped a SaaS by Myself. Here Is What It Actually Took.
What it took to get an AI text-to-speech platform from idea to a live SaaS with paying customers, solo. The build is the easy part.
- #saas
- #solo_dev
- #stripe
- #shipping
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10 AI Coding Agents Are Fast. They Are Also Confidently Wrong.
Real debugging scars from building a portfolio with AI coding agents. The tools are a genuine superpower and a fluent liar, and the skill is holding both at once.
- #ai_coding
- #claude_code
- #solo_dev
- #debugging
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11 How One Person Ships Like a Team.
The repeatable system behind a multi-project portfolio. The trick is never solving a solved problem twice, so the next project starts halfway down the field.
- #solo_dev
- #system
- #process
- #shipping
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