Blog
Notes from building small products as a solo dev. Technical posts on the tools I use, the things I've broken, and what I've learned to do differently. AI-assisted drafting and human-edited — see the Editorial Standards page.
· LLC · solo dev · California · business
The actual steps to form a California single-member LLC for a side-project-turned-product: Articles of Organization, registered agent, the Statement of Information, the $800 franchise tax, EIN, and a business bank account. With the prices as of 2026.
· editorial · AI content · writing
What human review actually catches in AI drafts, with specific examples from a few months of editing Claude-drafted anime recaps. Not a manifesto — just the checks that survive contact with real drafts.
· AI content · Astro · Firebase · Claude · pipeline
How I built a daily content pipeline that drafts anime season recaps with Claude, runs ffmpeg over trailer videos for scroll-linked scene frames, and gates every post behind a human review PR.
· AdSense · SEO · debugging
Why AdSense's ads.txt status shows 'Not found' when the file is demonstrably served, what the apex-vs-subdomain confusion actually is, and how to debug it without resubmitting your site forever.
· Astro · tech choices · static sites
After shipping two Astro sites in a row, here's why it keeps winning out over Next.js and 11ty for content-driven solo-dev projects. Static-first, islands when you need them, Markdown content collections that just work.
· Firebase · GitHub Actions · GCP · CI/CD · security
Five days of silently failing deploys, an org policy blocking service account keys, and the path to a keyless GitHub Actions setup. A practical walkthrough with the gcloud commands that actually worked.