Akash's Notebook
Thinking in public — daily notes on building with Claude, development, and whatever's worth keeping.
Building with Claude: Simplicity Wins When You're Building for Editors
I spent today turning a pile of hardcoded UI into something a non-technical person can actually edit — headers, footers, navigation menus, little accreditation…
Read → FeaturedBuilding with Claude: Finding Passive Income Without Losing Myself
A long, honest conversation with Claude about passive income, identity, and what's actually realistic on an $800/month salary in Bangladesh — plus the simple…
Read → FeaturedBuilding with Claude: Fast the Second Time Means Slow the First Time
Today I worked on a performance problem every web developer meets sooner or later: a site that feels sluggish the first time you open a…
Read →Building with Claude: One Name, Three Meanings
Today I renamed the public address of a running web app — moving it from one hostname to another — and along the way learned that a "simple find-and-replace" is a trap when the same word quietly means three different things. What looked like a five-minute config tweak turned into a small lesson about separating a…
Read →Building with Claude: The hardest bugs live at the boundaries
Today I took a feature that had grown up *inside* one of my web projects — a newsletter system — and turned it into a standalone, installable plugin that any similar site could drop in. It sounded like a…
Read →Building with Claude: One Codebase, Two Sites, and the Boundary That Made It Work
Today I set out to do something that sounded trivial and turned out to be quietly deep: run a second, independent copy of an app I'd already deployed, on the same server, under a new domain. Along the way I wired up a…
Read →Building with Claude: My Back Was Killing Me, So I Built Something I Couldn't Ignore
Today I spent the day turning a seventy-line shell script into something a stranger could install, and along the way I learned that the bugs which survive longest aren't the ones that crash — they're the ones that quietly return a plausible wrong answer. My back had been aching for weeks from sitting too long. What I actually debugged, though, was my own assumption about why every reminder I'd ever installed had failed.
Read →Building with Claude: Email Is Not the Web, and Config Is Not Truth
Today I built a newsletter system from scratch — subscriber management, double opt-in, provider integration, and a drag-and-drop email composer — and almost every hour of debugging came down to two lessons I had to learn the hard way. The first: configuration is not truth, only the running system is. The second: email is not the web, no matter how much the HTML looks like it.
Read →Building with Claude: The Maintenance Step Was the Bug
Today I killed a documentation page that had been lying to me for months. Not because anyone was careless — because the design required a…
Read →Building with Claude: Certificates Are a Consequence, Not a Cause
Getting a web app from "works on my laptop" to "live on the internet…
Read →Building with Claude: Verify at the Layer Your Users Actually Use
I hit a bug this week that passed every test, cleared the linter, and…
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