Unfiltered notes from building SnippetsX, TomatoAI, and Awasdhara, and from working full-time as a Full Stack Engineer — what actually changed, what broke, and what I'd do differently.
Every time I paired with someone on a bug, we ended up in the same loop — screenshots, zipped folders, or a screen-share nobody could type into. SnippetsX started as a fix for that one annoyance.
Freelance and self-taught projects reward polish. A product team rewards throughput. Ten months into a full-time Full Stack Engineer role, that's the biggest recalibration I've had to make.
It wasn't the frameworks. I knew React and Node before anyone paid me to use them. What changed between the self-learning years and the job is harder to put on a resume.
Seventeen months building client work on the MERN stack at Ninepages Techsolutions taught me more about Redux than any tutorial ever did — mostly by showing me how not to use it.
The projects that got me hired were self-directed. It would be easy to let that stop the moment a job fills the same hours. I've tried not to let that happen.
TomatoAI started as a single question — why do I have five different tabs open for five different AI tools? The answer turned into a lesson in rate limits, fallbacks, and prompt templates.