Problem

Their only channels were Instagram and WhatsApp. Services, prices, availability: all of it had to be explained again to every new client, one conversation at a time. They needed one place where all of it lives.

Decision

A WordPress landing page rather than a static site, so the two partners can edit prices, publish events and open sign-ups themselves without calling me. Custom theme with ACF for the fields they actually touch, sign-ups routed to WhatsApp where their clients already are, and a professional mailbox on their own domain.

Result

They stop repeating themselves. Prices, services and their story are on an official site they own and update alone, and event sign-ups arrive in the tool they already use every day.

Problem

A school project with one hard rule: playback has to start before the file has finished downloading, and every library that already does that, webtorrent and peerflix included, is banned. So the streaming pipe had to be built by hand, on top of a torrent client, for files whose codecs the browser often cannot play.

Decision

The server writes the pieces it receives to disk in order and serves them over HTTP range requests, so the player can ask for the beginning while the end is still arriving. When the codec is not one the browser accepts, FFmpeg transcodes on the fly instead of converting the whole file first: it costs CPU, but the wait drops from minutes to seconds. Search hits two external catalogues of freely distributable video, and 42 OAuth handles login.

Result

Playback starts a few seconds after a click, on a file that does not exist yet. It also taught me where the real cost of streaming sits: not in the network, in the transcoding. And how to lie to a video element convincingly.

Problem

Multiplayer Tetris in the browser, with the interesting part in the constraints: no canvas, no SVG, no DOM libraries, no "this" on the client, board logic in pure functions only, and seventy percent test coverage. Every player in a game must also receive exactly the same sequence of pieces.

Decision

The board is plain immutable data in Redux and rendered as a CSS grid of divs, which sounds slow and is not. The server owns the piece sequence and the game state, and clients only send inputs and receive events over socket.io, so nobody can drift out of sync or cheat their own pieces. Pure functions for the board made the coverage requirement almost free to reach.

Result

Garbage lines, T-spins and spectrum views of every opponent, with input response under 30 ms on a decent connection. The rule I resented most was the ban on "this" in the client. It is the one that taught me the most.