Building a home on the web

I've been in software for 13 years, almost all of it in QA. Testing other people's code, filing bugs, doing sign-offs. Somewhere in between I kept building small things on the side — a journal app, a meds tracker for my parents, half-finished ideas in private repos. At some point it became obvious I enjoy building more than testing. Took me a while to say that out loud.

So I built this site. No template, no website builder. Next.js and TypeScript on the front, Payload CMS and MongoDB behind it. It has my resume, my projects and these notes. Every time I push code, Vercel picks it up and deploys. The whole thing costs me nothing to run.

What 13 years of QA actually gives you

When you've tested software this long, you can't look at a form without thinking — what happens if I submit it empty? What if I press back mid-save? That habit doesn't switch off when you start building. You end up handling the edge cases before anyone gets to file a bug against you. The QA years weren't a detour. They're the reason my code holds up.

Why this site exists

A resume that stays current because it lives next to my code. A page for the projects I build on evenings and weekends. And notes — some public like this one, some just for me. That's it, really.

Thanks for reading. More soon.