Engineering notes
Field notes from shipped systems
Architecture decisions, failure modes, and design rationale from real robotics, AI, and backend work. Rough edges included.
Featured
May 31, 20267 min read
Building an end-to-end voice outreach pipeline in n8n: GPT-4o scripts, ElevenLabs cloning, and the tuning parameters I got wrong first
How I built an n8n workflow that turns a CRM lead into a personalized voiced voicemail in ~15 seconds — and what I learned about ElevenLabs stability, similarity boost, and why the defaults sound robotic.
- n8n
- ElevenLabs
- GPT-4o
- Automation
May 31, 20268 min read
STT → function calling → TTS: what building a voice CRM interface taught me about GPT-4o tool dispatch
How the Voice-Driven CRM Assistant works — Whisper transcription, three GPT-4o function definitions, Switch-node dispatch, Supabase memory, and the defensive edge cases that made it actually usable.
- n8n
- OpenAI
- Function Calling
- Whisper
May 18, 20265 min readLaunch readiness and idempotency
Partner fintech escrow: launch readiness is mostly about keeping state honest
Field notes from a closed-source escrow build: retries, idempotency, scheduler locks, mobile money paths, and the gap between feature-complete and launch-ready.
- Partner Build
- Fintech
- Idempotency
- Launch Readiness
May 17, 20265 min readLaunch hardening review
Sellavie.ai launch hardening: the work nobody sees until it fails
A security and launch pass across the Sellavie backend, dashboard, mobile app, CI, logging, and generated artifact hygiene.
- Sellavie.ai
- Security
- CI
- Launch Risk
May 6, 20264 min readTrial feedback and retention
Sellavie.ai feedback flow: a small feature with billing edges
Building trial feedback collection and launch incentives — what looks like a simple feature once you trace it through billing, email, dashboard state, and admin settings.
- Sellavie.ai
- Retention
- Billing
- Regression Tests
More notes
May 31, 20265 min read
ElevenLabs voice settings are not cosmetic: what stability, similarity boost, and style exaggeration actually do
A practical breakdown of the four ElevenLabs voice settings that matter — what they control, how they interact, and what happens when you leave them at the defaults.
May 22, 20264 min read
The NDA problem in engineering portfolios
Most of my interesting recent work is under NDA. Here is how I think about what to share and why the system shape is usually more useful to describe than the implementation details.
May 4, 20264 min read
Partner fintech escrow: mobile flows made the backend assumptions visible
Turning escrow state, disputes, KYC, bank accounts, messaging, and notifications into mobile and operations flows — and what that exposed about the backend contract.
Apr 29, 20264 min read
Partner fintech escrow: payment and admin security before polish
Hardening provider boundaries, admin access, cache headers, rate limits, webhook validation, and transaction service behavior on a closed-source escrow platform.
Apr 25, 20265 min read
I built a webhook inspector because tunnel logs are a bad source of truth
A FastAPI and React tool for receiving callbacks, checking signatures, replaying events, and seeing what happened without digging through scattered logs.
Apr 25, 20265 min read
The boring part of real-time vision is what keeps it usable
A real-time object detection dashboard with a YOLO-ready detector interface, WebSocket streaming, live overlays, and a backpressure loop that stops the UI from lying.
Apr 25, 20264 min read
A document QA agent is only useful when it can show its work
Building a RAG demo as a product problem: ingestion, chunking, retrieval, citations, bounded storage, and a mock answer path that reviewers can run without API keys.
Apr 25, 20264 min read
Making path planning readable without a robot in the room
An interactive robotics planning sandbox for comparing A*, Dijkstra, and an RRT-style planner with visible tradeoffs instead of a black-box animation.
Apr 22, 20266 min read
Sellavie.ai: the sales agent is only half the system
What I learned turning AI chat into a commerce workflow with tenants, handoff, payments, and enough guardrails to be useful in the real world.
Apr 21, 20263 min read
Partner fintech escrow: admin RBAC before launch pressure
Tightening admin security, role assignment, and operational permissions before the fintech platform moved deeper into launch work.
Apr 13, 20263 min read
Partner fintech escrow: the initial commit was already a whole platform
The first XcroPay repo snapshot: public web, mobile, admin, API, shared schemas, migrations, docs, integrations, and brand assets — platform-shaped from the start.
Apr 7, 20264 min read
Partner entertainment commerce: the campaign site became an operations surface
A music, merch, ticketing, checkout, delivery, and door-operations build delivered through DZND.studio — what looks like a campaign site on the outside, and a small commerce operation underneath.
Mar 23, 20263 min read
Partner Web3 launch page: static does not mean careless
A token information site, swap guidance, owner/contact visibility, and correcting deployment ownership before production — because who owns the deploy matters.
Mar 23, 20264 min read
Sellavie.ai purchase flow: the regression wall that made the agent safer
Hardening purchase intent, stale orders, handoff behavior, payment interpretation, and building a regression suite after real conversation failure patterns showed up.
Mar 22, 20264 min read
Sellavie.ai pipeline: purchase intent, handoff, and context loss
Stabilizing the AI sales pipeline after context loss, stock disclosure, handoff, and model-choice problems showed up at the same time.
Feb 28, 20264 min read
Sellavie.ai Instagram webhooks: the delivery fight
OAuth, Instagram business accounts, webhook subscriptions, message tags, and the difference between 'connected' and actually receiving events.
Feb 25, 20263 min read
Sellavie.ai mobile: turning the dashboard into an operator surface
Adding an Expo mobile and tablet app across auth, dashboard, admin, products, conversations, settings, and training surfaces — and why mobile changes the product contract.
Feb 18, 20264 min read
Sellavie.ai retention, failover, and queue APIs
Tiered retention features, AI failover, queue APIs, and the move from chatbot demo toward SaaS operations.
Feb 16, 20263 min read
Sellavie.ai security: TOTP and safer deletion flows
Strengthening account protection and data deletion behavior before the product got more operational surface area.
Feb 7, 20263 min read
Sellavie.ai payment gateway: where chat met checkout
Payment-gateway work, frontend checkout changes, and the first big step from messaging automation to commerce automation.
Feb 1, 20263 min read
Sellavie.ai Meta webhooks: first pass at real channel integration
The first webhook and Meta setup phase — before later OAuth and delivery debugging made the integration more durable.
Jan 31, 20263 min read
Sellavie.ai v4 beta: the first real product snapshot
The earliest useful Sellavie commit: backend and frontend changing together, already pushing toward business workflow rather than chatbot demo.