A few things I build a lot, and how they actually work.
Offline-first field apps
capture→local queue→reconcile→sync
Work is captured straight to the device and dropped onto a durable queue, so a dead connection never loses anything. When the network returns, queued events replay in order and conflicts resolve against server state — the person using it never has to think about "offline."
TypeScript · IndexedDB · service workers · REST / JWT
AI document pipelines
ingest→extract→classify→validate→report
Inbound files move through isolated serverless steps: OCR pulls the text, an LLM classifies and structures it, results are checked against reference data, and a clean report comes out the other end. Each step is retryable, so one bad input never stalls the batch.
Python · serverless · Claude API · OCR
Image detection & segmentation
image→on-device model→vision-LLM fallback→structured result
A fast on-device model locates and segments objects and text in a photo in real time; anything it's unsure about escalates to a vision-LLM for a second opinion. Raw pixels go in, structured and checkable data comes out.
YOLO · on-device CV · vision LLM · TypeScript
Automated discovery & monitoring
scan sources→filter→LLM-score→dedup→digest
A scheduled job sweeps multiple sources, cuts the noise with a keyword pass, then has an LLM score each item for fit with a short reason. Everything seen is remembered so nothing repeats, and a single ranked digest lands in your inbox each morning.
serverless cron · Claude API · KV store · email
Operational reporting
pull sources→narrow to active→aggregate→generate→schedule
A scheduled service pulls from several internal APIs, retries the ones that flake, narrows to the accounts that actually moved in the window, and writes the report the business runs its week on. The narrowing is the part that matters — a report covering everything is a report nobody opens, so it covers what changed and says plainly when nothing did.
Python · scheduled jobs · REST APIs · retry/backoff
Pricing & cost engines
reference prices→match items→price→snapshot→serve
Takes a reference price table and a set of items, works out what each one costs, and serves it behind an API other systems can query. The decision worth repeating is the snapshot: it is built deliberately free of personal data, so prices can be cached, shared and queried without dragging PII along behind them.
Python · FastAPI · SQL · pytest
System integrations
source API→transform→dedup + retry→destination
Scheduled bridges that pull records from an internal API and push them to a third-party platform — format conversion, deduplication, retries, structured logging — so systems that were never meant to agree stay in sync without anyone babysitting them. Each one is small enough to read in a sitting, takes its credentials from a secrets manager with an environment fallback, keeps no state it does not need, and ships with a mock of the far end so the failure modes can be tested without touching anyone else's production.
serverless · AWS Lambda · Terraform · queues · REST / SOAP · webhooks
// also: document & PDF generation · data-import pipelines · legacy API gateways · admin dashboards · environment sync tooling · accounting exports