First-person accounts of real software engagements. Problem, approach, outcome, lesson.
In a five-day sprint, I built an internal PowerPoint QA app that combined deterministic brand-rule checks with gated AI judgment, cutting a noisy first pass from 110 findings to 31 while preserving recall on the annotated deck.
A near-signed enterprise client needed a purchase flow the product did not have. I led the trade-off, avoided a full parallel system, and shipped a contained workaround in a week that later handled thousands of transactions.
I built and ran a regional digital subscription platform for 4.5 years, raising paid subscribers 20%, crossing 500,000 monthly users, and keeping uptime at 99.9%.
Before refactoring a WordPress payment plugin processing $3.4M a year and growing 79% YoY, I documented how money actually moved through it. The blueprint pass surfaced what tests-first never would.