// engineering notes & technical write-ups
We built an AI-powered document verification platform in 8 days, shipped it live, and still missed the top 50 cut at Squad Hackathon 3.0. This is the honest breakdown of what we built, how we built it, and where it fell apart.
Six days. One teammate dropped out. AMD credits never arrived. We switched stacks mid-build and submitted anyway. A debrief on building Redress at the AMD Developer Hackathon 2026.
Render's free tier spins down after inactivity and your users pay for it in load times. Here's the fix — no credit card required.
A honest debrief on building Cortexa — an AI chat platform with streaming, auth, model selection, voice input, and image upload — what I got right, what broke, and what I'd do differently.
Every developer's first program is Hello World. So it only felt right to start here.