Learned Geek Blog

Step-by-step guide to playing your first API Combat battle using nothing but curl. From registration to victory in 5 minutes.

We had architecture documents, code smell guides, testing strategies, and a global AI instructions file with every lesson learned. We found 34 bugs in one audit. This is what happens after 'it works.'

Your dynamic class names aren't working. The CSS exists in your code but not in your output. Here's why Tailwind's JIT compiler is ignoring you and how to fix it.

An AI wrote me a CI workflow. I understood maybe 40% of it. So I went line by line until I understood all of it. Here's what each piece does and why it's there.

A complete lesson plan with weekly activities, deliverables, and a weighted assessment rubric—mapped to 15 Wisconsin Computer Science Standards. Ready for your department chair.

Students don't care about todo APIs. But they'll build combat bots to beat their classmates. Same concepts. Different motivation.

The API is the game. The UI constraints are gone. Build what you want. Automate what you need. Play how you choose.

An API-only combat game where building the client is part of the gameplay. No UI. No graphics. Just REST endpoints and strategic combat.

Every mobile game is hiding its secrets in a file you already have. Here's how I went from 'I wonder how this works' to extracting thousands of files of game data — using free tools and an afternoon.

Someone dropped the classic comment under my Tailwind post. It's the same false choice that shows up with every new tool: ORMs vs SQL, TypeScript vs JavaScript, AI vs coding. The premise — that using modern tools means you skipped the fundamentals — is almost always backwards.

I downloaded an APK, cracked open its Unity asset bundles, extracted 2,880 compiled Lua files, and built a team optimizer that actually knows the math. Here's how.

You've been using Bootstrap for years. Then someone mentions Tailwind and suddenly you're supposed to write class names that look like inline styles from 2003. Here's why it's actually better.

Good dark mode should be instant, persistent, and user-controlled. Here's how to build it in about 20 lines of code — no library, no framework, no flash of wrong theme.

There's a moment in every project where the thing you've been building becomes real. In software, it's the first production deploy. In fiction, it's the day the proof arrives.

Stop thinking about function pointers. Start thinking about bells and notifications. A restaurant analogy that makes C# events actually make sense.

ChatGPT will not write your novel for you. After months of trying, here's what AI actually does well for fiction—and where it fails catastrophically.

You type something into Google. Billions of pages exist. How does it know about them? How does it decide which ten to show? Here's search engines explained for everyone.

Part 2 of the SMS AI series. RAG transforms generic AI into useful AI. Here's how I added vector search, conversation memory, and production resilience.

Can I text an AI instead of opening another app? Turns out yes—and it validates a compelling business model. Here's how I built SMS-to-custom-LLM in ~40 lines of code.

You wrote a blog post. Now you need to share it on LinkedIn, Twitter, maybe a newsletter. Here's how to automate the boring part.

Tonight I'm joining Novel90's Spring 2026 cohort. 90 days to turn a messy first draft into something publishable. Here's why I'm doing it publicly.