A curious builder

How I think about building

I daily-drove vanilla Arch with Hyprland for over a year. Not because I needed to — because I wanted to understand every layer between me and the hardware. That same itch drives everything I build. When I saw that yay wasn't written in Rust, my brain went "can I make something even remotely close?" — andax happened. A pacman wrapper that started as a weekend experiment and turned into a proper tool published on crates.io.

Vellum exists because every EPUB and CBZ reader I tried was either bloated beyond belief or missing the basics. I didn't just want a better reader — I wanted to understand how a CBZ archive is structured, how an EPUB gets rendered, how Room and Hilt play together in a modern Android stack. The final product is nice, but the real reward was the rabbit holes I fell into along the way.

I don't really believe in titles. "Frontend dev," "backend dev," "mobile dev" — they box you into role limitations that don't exist in the real world. A problem doesn't care what your LinkedIn says. I write Rust, Kotlin, TypeScript, whatever the problem needs. The point is to solve it well and understand every line you wrote while doing it.

Even now, with AI writing code faster than most of us can read it, I think developers are more responsible than ever — for architecture, for understanding each line, for finding the edge cases that a model won't catch. The tools change. The thinking doesn't.

Working is learning. They've never been separate things for me. Every project teaches me something I didn't expect, every rabbit hole leads somewhere interesting, and it's genuinely fun to keep learning new technologies in this ever-growing field of 0s and 1s.

Just here until my kernel panics.