Case Studies
How I built X, end to end: the problem, the debugging story, the fix and the measured result. This is my working portfolio.
11 posts in this category
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Your Own Speech-to-Text Server: Faster Than Typing, Private by Default
I run a self-hosted speech-to-text API on a single GPU PC. Dictation works from Windows, iPhone, iPad and Android — private, unlimited, and about 5x faster than typing.
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Self-Healing Access Control for Digital Goods: NocoDB, n8n, and AList
How I built a five-workflow entitlement system that grants, expires, and continuously repairs customer file access — with a build-time code-sharing trick and a public endpoint designed to leak nothing.
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Shipping an AI Photo Editor as a WordPress Plugin: 22 Versions of Hard Lessons
From a single HTML file to a shipped WordPress plugin: the fal.ai async queue, a watermark that must never silently fail, optional lead capture, and five bugs that only appeared in production.
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How I Self-Hosted a Mem0 Memory Stack (So My AI Agent Remembers)
A private, self-hosted memory layer for AI agents — mem0 API + LiteLLM + PostgreSQL with pgvector on a Synology NAS. Semantic memory under your control, not a third party's.
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How I Made My Own Songs with Suno AI
I wrote the lyrics, tuned the prompts, and shipped seven songs with Suno AI — folk ballads, a kids' tune, an anime-style Heart Sutra. Full workflow + the tracks.
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How I Built an AI Furniture Compositing Demo With FLUX.1 Kontext
Compositing furniture photos into styled room scenes with fal.ai FLUX.1 Kontext — the multi-image endpoint, the tainted-canvas fix, and why prompt enhancement had to go.
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Syncing a Self-Improving AI Agent Across Machines
How I sync my Hermes agent's skills, config, and cron jobs between two PCs with a git-backed profile distribution — and why I sync manually instead of on a cron.
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Why Your Headless Browser Can't Scrape Everything
Two second-hand marketplaces, two very different walls: Goofish blocks a headless browser with 'illegal access' while Carousell keeps serving data. The lesson is to read how a page delivers data before you reach for Playwright.
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How I Vetted 20 VPS Providers in Three Hours with Parallel Subagents
A case study in orchestrating parallel AI subagents to run due diligence on 20 hosting providers — WHOIS, AUP, and reputation checks — collapsing a multi-hour research task into a structured, verifiable vendor scorecard.
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How I Built the DigiKedai Telegram AI Bot
A customer-support AI bot that answers questions and provisions free-trial accounts over Telegram and WhatsApp — TypeScript, grammY, a Cloudflare tunnel webhook, and a self-hosted LiteLLM gateway.
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How I Host This Blog: Astro, Gitea Actions, and Self-Hosted CI/CD
A walkthrough of the end-to-end pipeline that builds and serves this site — git-as-CMS, a self-hosted runner on my unRaid server, and Cloudflare in front.