Things I figured out
the hard way.

The bug that broke Rentwise's invite flow taught me something important about where auth actually needs to live in an App Router project.

Vector search sounds simple until you realise the quality of your embeddings, chunking strategy, and reranking step matter more than the model you query.

FFmpeg → BullMQ → Cloudflare R2 → adaptive streaming. Here is how the whole thing fits together, and the three things I would do differently now.

Not a motivational post. A brutally honest breakdown of the skills that crossed over, the ones that did not, and the one thing teaching prepared me for that no bootcamp could.