// build log
Short notes on what I'm building and learning as I go.
June 2026
I'd never built a website before, so I started from an empty folder and learned Next.js and React as I went. The biggest unlocks were understanding components, getting comfortable deploying through GitHub and Vercel, and using a dynamic route so each project gets its own page from a single template. Seeing it go live at my own URL made all the debugging worth it.
June 2026
I went back to Specusol — the dashboard my teammate and I built at EnergyHack — and gave it the documentation it deserved: a clear README explaining what it does, who built which part, and how to run it. Writing it up made me realize how much I actually learned in those 24 hours, from the ERCOT zone map to deploying on Render for the first time.
2026
My next project is an end-to-end data pipeline for personal transactions. I'm treating it like real software instead of a one-off script — building the ETL flow, adding z-score anomaly detection, and wiring up tests and CI so it stays reliable as it grows. It's how I'm teaching myself data engineering: by building something I'd actually use.