Cross-platform desktop apps
Animo (opens in a new tab) installs and updates cleanly on Windows, macOS, and Linux from a single codebase, packaged with Tauri instead of Electron.
Products
Areas of engineering, product design, and growth I've learned by making products.
Engineering
Systems-level performance
Animo (opens in a new tab) renders animations frame by frame on the user's own machine, so its core is written in Rust to keep memory, binary size, and startup small enough to run on modest hardware.
Multi-provider LLM integration
Animo (opens in a new tab) stays agnostic to any OpenRouter provider or model, and Dreamify (opens in a new tab) runs open-source image models through Replicate so the backend can be swapped without a rewrite.
AI agents and MCP tooling
Marcebot (opens in a new tab) is an MCP server that turns me into a callable tool, so an agent can pause a long task and get a human decision over a real-time channel, and Launch Plugins (opens in a new tab) taught developers to give ChatGPT new tools through plugins.
Prompt engineering and LLM evaluation
Generative Manim (opens in a new tab) and Animo (opens in a new tab) both turn plain text into Manim animations, which meant building prompt strategies and benchmarks to measure how often a model returns animation code that actually renders.
Machine learning in the browser
Scanner Cam (opens in a new tab) recognizes objects from a live camera feed entirely client-side with TensorFlow.js, so it needs no server and no backend GPU.
Extending third-party platforms
Graphem (opens in a new tab) is an experimental NASA Open MCT plugin that pulls telemetry from a GraphQL endpoint, and Platzi Extensions (opens in a new tab) adds keyboard shortcuts to Platzi exams across Chrome and Safari.
Building on public APIs
1SpaceX (opens in a new tab) makes the full SpaceX API browsable, Hackbank (opens in a new tab) models each bank's commission and delay rules for transfers, and SoundAir (opens in a new tab) pulls AI-generated music from across SoundCloud into one place.
Space and mission-control software
Graphem (opens in a new tab) extends NASA Open MCT, the open-source framework used to monitor spacecraft telemetry during missions, so the work meant learning how mission control ingests and visualizes real-time data.
Product design
Turning a model into a product
Dreamify (opens in a new tab) puts Stable Diffusion behind a single prompt box, Generative Manim (opens in a new tab) turns a text field into finished Manim animations with no code, and Scanner Cam (opens in a new tab) is just point the camera and read the labels.
Learning-first UX
Advibesor (opens in a new tab) is an iOS app in SwiftUI that coaches people to write better prompts as they use it, and Launch Plugins (opens in a new tab) walked first-time developers through their first plugin with guided tutorials instead of a reference dump.
Native mobile apps
I shipped Advibesor (opens in a new tab) in SwiftUI for iOS and Hackbank (opens in a new tab) in React Native and Expo for iOS and Android, with Firebase behind it.
Social dynamics and anonymity
lovetext (opens in a new tab) is an anonymous social network that grew organically around its February 14 launch.
Growth
Launch timing on new platforms
Generative Manim (opens in a new tab) went out six days after GPT-4 and became the top r/ChatGPT post that day, and Animo (opens in a new tab) was later cited in the GPT-4 paper as one of the applications launched alongside the model.
Organic search growth
Dreamify (opens in a new tab) kept compounding in Google Search for image-generation queries long after launch, and 1SpaceX (opens in a new tab) still ranks for people looking up SpaceX components and specs.
Open-source traction
Generative Manim (opens in a new tab) grew its own contributor base as a widely forked and starred repo, and Graphem (opens in a new tab) shipped on npm for the Open MCT community to install.
Monetization and licensing
Animo (opens in a new tab) moved from free experiment to a paid desktop license aimed at students and teachers, with releases and go-to-market built around versioned launches.
Developer community
Launch Plugins (opens in a new tab) grew by helping other developers ship their first ChatGPT plugin, and lovetext (opens in a new tab) launched seasonally with a sharing loop built in between friends and family.