I’ve had portfolio project ideas for Backend and AI Engineering before — written at different times, each answering the same question differently: do I position myself for a specific role, or build what I find interesting and let the résumé follow? None of them got built. Not because the ideas were bad — the architectures were actually fairly detailed — but because each one tried to prove too much at once: a backend split across multiple languages “to show I know them all,” telemetry, observability, multi-agent orchestration, all in the same first version. The kind of scope that feels good on paper and turns overwhelming right when you’d need to write the first line of code. ...

The first post in this series was about the decision — why I’m starting small, why the earlier project ideas never got built. This one is about the day I actually wrote code, and about what broke along the way — because almost nothing worked on the first try, and I think that part is more interesting than if it had gone perfectly. The scaffold itself For the backend I used FastAPI and uvicorn, managed with uv — fast, and about as simple as it gets to wire up: a @app.get(path="/") decorator over the handler function. For the frontend, React and TypeScript, scaffolded with Vite. ...