Journal

03 //Aug 2026

Why BullMQ throws 'Custom Id cannot contain :' — and 1,034 green tests missed it

BullMQ refuses a custom job id with a colon. Four of my five id builders used one, and 1,034 green tests spied on queue.add and never noticed.

Ownership · Part 5

04 //Aug 2026

A 116-line build gate that fails on broken internal links

A post-build script that walks the prerendered HTML and fails the build on any internal href the build did not emit — and why it reads output, not data.

Ownership · Part 4

05 //Aug 2026

loading.tsx turns every notFound() into an indexable soft-404

A streaming loading.tsx flushes headers at 200, so notFound() paints 404 UI into a committed response. Finding and fixing an indexable soft-404 factory.

Ownership · Part 2

SEO / AEO6 min

06 //Aug 2026

One line in layout.tsx told Google 90 pages were duplicates of my homepage

A canonical set in a Next.js root layout is inherited by every route. Mine made all 90 pages declare themselves duplicates of the homepage — silently.

Ownership · Part 1

SEO / AEO3 min

07 //Aug 2026

Your sitemap can submit 200-status Not Found pages

My sitemap nominated a URL the build never emitted, because it composed detail URLs with slugify(name) while the routes were keyed by id.

Ownership · Part 3

SEO / AEO4 min

08 //Aug 2026

Why does an LLM API call return an empty string? Reasoning tokens count against max_tokens

Every AI caption call 500'd in production: a reasoning model spent max_tokens thinking, finish_reason was 'length', and my client returned ''.

Ownership · Part 4

09 //Aug 2026

Most of my automation is failure handling

A third of my n8n video pipeline — 13 of 40 nodes — exists only for failure: retries, error writes, cleanup. The happy path was the easy part.

Ownership

Engineering6 min

10 //Aug 2026

How to render Thai SVG text byte-identically on macOS and in Alpine Docker

SVG text through sharp asks fontconfig for fonts: hundreds on a Mac, none in Alpine. resvg with bundled static fonts gave byte-identical Thai on both.

Ownership · Part 3

11 //Aug 2026

Why an image model must never render the text on your product cards

A bulk AI restyle of our price cards dropped rows, invented a code and turned LINE into LIME, and every card looked finished. What replaced it.

Ownership · Part 2

12 //Aug 2026

Why our social publisher reported success for posts that never went out

Before it ever touched a platform, our social publisher could go green for posts sent private, wrong or not at all. What we fixed, and what it cost.

Ownership · Part 1

13 //Aug 2026

How I became CTO at 23 of the company that hired me as a part-time student

Hired part-time in August 2021, CTO of the same company in August 2026 — five years to the month. What actually happened in between, honestly scoped.

Ownership

Engineering3 min

14 //Aug 2026

The plan was to come back in 2030. I came back in 2026.

The plan said Senior at JTS, then back to the family company in 2030 as Technical Lead. Instead: CTO on 2026-08-01 — four years early, one level higher.

Ownership

15 //Aug 2026

Sole PM, sole PO, sole designer — and the engineer

My CTO role description lists me as sole PM, PO and UI/UX designer. Four viewpoints in one head, and the implementer wins every argument by default.

Ownership

Engineering6 min

16 //Jul 2026

402 MB to 126 MB: what was actually in my Next.js container

My portfolio held 402 MB resident for a static site. Most of it was 26.7 MB of icon JSON the page graph never used but loaded at boot anyway.

Freelance Thread · Part 2

Infrastructure4 min

17 //Jul 2026

Dropping next/image on purpose: libvips, host cores, and the qualities:[100] trap

My image optimizer re-encoded every image at quality 100 because of a one-value allowlist, while keeping libvips resident. I removed it entirely.

Freelance Thread · Part 4

Infrastructure5 min

18 //Jul 2026

MALLOC_ARENA_MAX across a glibc bump hiding in an unsuffixed -slim tag

Moving node:24-slim to node:26-slim also crossed Debian stable, glibc 2.36 to 2.41 — the layer MALLOC_ARENA_MAX acts on. So I measured it.

Freelance Thread · Part 3

Infrastructure6 min

19 //Jul 2026

Build with Bun, serve with Node: dodging a standalone RSS leak

I use Bun everywhere in this repo except the one place that matters most: serving. Why the runtime stage of my Dockerfile is plain node:26-slim.

Freelance Thread · Part 1

Infrastructure4 min

20 //Jul 2026

Three places a Railway container can get its start command

railway.toml, the Dockerfile CMD, and package.json can each supply a start command. Making all three agree is cheaper than finding out which one won.

Freelance Thread · Part 5

Infrastructure5 min

21 //Jun 2026

Token-free GitHub stats with ISR: no PAT, no rate-limit wall

How I render live GitHub contributions, stars and language bytes with no access token: a public REST fan-out, daily ISR, and null on every failure.

Freelance Thread

22 //May 2026

next-intl Thai/English localization with a shared UI workspace

Three days into a Bun monorepo I shipped next-intl Thai/English routing and moved the shadcn set into a shared workspace package. What that actually costs.

Scale

23 //Jan 2026

Localizing a storefront to Thai while replacing its design system

On 30 January 2026 I swapped RS Award's design system and localized it to Thai in one milestone. Thai is a typography constraint, not a translation step.

Scale

24 //Jan 2026

Switching from Prisma/Postgres to MongoDB mid-build

Eight weeks into a Next.js catalog rebuild I replaced Prisma and Postgres with MongoDB. What forced it, what it cost, and why Postgres was not the problem.

Scale

2025

01 //Nov 2025

Retiring self-managed VMs and CircleCI + SSH for Railway across a fleet

Moving a fleet of 15+ services off self-managed VMs and CircleCI + SSH onto Railway, and what config-as-code changes about who owns a host.

Scale · Part 2

Infrastructure5 min

02 //Oct 2025

We replaced a NATS message bus with plain HTTP calls

Why 15+ NestJS services dropped a NATS bus for direct HTTP on the internal request path, and what a message bus really charges you.

Scale · Part 1

03 //Jun 2025

Server-Sent Events for realtime game rooms — why not WebSockets

Why I streamed poker room state over Server-Sent Events instead of WebSockets: one-way push, reconnects for free, and the costs I accepted.

Freelance Thread

04 //Jun 2025

Test-driving a poker hand evaluator

Why a poker hand evaluator is the rare piece of software worth writing strictly test-first — a finite, published, fully verifiable spec.

Freelance Thread

05 //Jun 2025

Adding a blog system and JSON-LD to a catalog storefront

A week after replacing a WordPress catalog with Next.js, I rebuilt the blog, sitemap and structured data the CMS had been giving away for free.

The Bridge

SEO / AEO5 min

06 //Feb 2025

Role-based accounts with NextAuth, bcrypt and Zod — the whole flow

Day two of a 13-day freelance build: NextAuth credentials with bcrypt, one Zod schema validated on both sides, and where a user's role actually lives.

Freelance Thread

Next.js4 min

2024

01 //Mar 2024

Designing a multi-branch restaurant schema in Prisma

Modelling multiple restaurant locations in Prisma for my 2024 senior thesis: one branch root, composite keys, and the cost of designing for two.

Student Years

02 //Mar 2024

Why I built my thesis on Nuxt 3 instead of Next.js

Choosing Nuxt 3 over Next.js for a solo senior thesis in 2024: what auto-imports, Nitro and Vue reactivity gave me, and why I never chose it again.

Student Years

03 //Jan 2024

Starting to freelance in my third year of university

Why I started taking client work on 1 January 2024 — mid-degree, already holding a part-time dev job and a thesis — and what the first year produced.

Freelance Thread

2023

01 //Aug 2023

Replacing restaurant POS hardware with QR ordering: scoping a senior thesis

Scoping my Thammasat senior thesis in August 2023: replacing restaurant POS hardware with QR ordering — three surfaces, a Prisma schema, a Nuxt 3 bet.

Student Years

02 //Apr 2023

On-page SEO for a bilingual Thai B2B catalog

On-page SEO for a Thai trophy catalog: category pages as the landing pages, bilingual Thai-English titles, and measuring a funnel that ends on the phone.

Student Years

SEO / AEO5 min

03 //Jan 2023

Three storefronts in ten months on the boring stack

Three WordPress storefronts for my family's trophy factory in ten months, solo, while studying CS full-time — the four-phase playbook and what boring cost.

Student Years

Commerce4 min

2022

01 //Nov 2022

Launching a WooCommerce storefront for a Thai manufacturer

Why a CS student chose WooCommerce over custom code for his family's trophy factory storefront — and why the 'temporary' launch ran for three years.

Student Years

Commerce4 min

02 //Sep 2022

Designing a brand-aligned WordPress catalog theme without a designer

Making a WordPress catalog theme look like a sixteen-year-old awards brand — a second-year CS student, no designer, no brand book, no budget.

Student Years

Commerce5 min

03 //Mar 2022

My first client work was WordPress, and that was the right call

Seven months into my CS degree, I built my family's award-catalog site on WordPress instead of custom code. Why the boring choice was the right one.

Student Years