Name what it cost
Every decision trades one property for another. An engineer who lists only upsides has either not finished thinking or is selling you something. I write the cost line first.
About
Shabs — full-stack engineer
I build web products end to end — and write down how they work.
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I design the schema, write the API, build the interface, and stay on for the part where it has to keep working. Most of what I do is full-stack web: TypeScript everywhere, Postgres underneath, and as little framework ceremony as I can get away with.
The other half of the job is explaining it. Every system I ship leaves behind a writeup — the decision I made, the option I rejected, and what it cost. That archive is the Learn and Lab sections of this site.
If you want the shortest possible version of how I work, read one case study and skip to the decision table. That section is the whole argument.
How I work
Four things I actually believe
Not values on a wall. These are the ones that change what I do on a Tuesday.
Boring where it matters
Clever code in a payment path, an auth check, or a migration gets removed at 2am by someone who is not you. Save the cleverness for places where being wrong is cheap.
Measure on the real device
Thirty minutes with a throttled mid-range phone beats a month of speculation about why mobile conversion is down. The tooling only matters if it runs on every pull request.
Write it down while confused
The best person to explain something is whoever was stuck on it recently enough to remember why. That window closes fast, which is why the Learn section exists.
Work with me
Four ways that usually go well
I will tell you honestly if your project is a poor fit for me, including when someone cheaper would serve you better.
Product builds
End to end, from an empty repository to something people pay for. Schema, API, interface, deploy, and the on-call afterwards.
Rescue work
An app that got slow, fragile, or frightening to deploy. Usually six weeks, and the deliverable includes the regression gate that keeps it fixed.
Technical review
A few days reading a codebase and writing up what will hurt in six months. Cheapest thing I do and frequently the most valuable.
Teaching
A small number of one-to-one sessions, weighted toward people crossing from tutorials into production systems.
5Case studies
12Lessons written
20Tips published
2 daysTypical reply time