标签：#sass

I came into this as a graphic designer, not a software engineer. I didn't have a computer science background, and a lot of what BrandStack needed — authentication, databases, payments, deployment — was new territory for me when I started. What made it possible wasn't some shortcut. It was breaking the problem down into pieces I could actually learn: how user accounts work, how a database should be structured so one person's data never leaks into another's, how to move from test payments to real ones without breaking checkout for actual customers. I made real mistakes along the way. Early on, every user shared the same underlying brand data because I hadn't scoped the database correctly to each account — a serious bug that I only caught by testing with two separate accounts myself. Finding and fixing that taught me more about proper application architecture than any tutorial could have. I don't think being a designer first is a disadvantage for building product. If anything, it means the interface and the experience get real attention, not just the backend logic. But it does mean being honest about what you don't know yet, and being willing to slow down and actually understand a problem instead of copying a fix you don't understand. BrandStack is still a work in progress. But it's a real, working product — built by someone who had to learn most of this from scratch, in public, one bug at a time.

When we started Reach , the plan was simple. We had a bunch of small businesses we were already in touch with - real SMBs, the kind that live on WhatsApp and don't have a "tech team." We'd give each of them an AI agent that talks to their customers, hand them a clean starter template for the instructions, and let them tweak it from there. That was the whole bet: give people a good starting prompt and a template, and they'll play along. We were so wrong it's almost funny now. The part nobody warns you about Here's the thing about prompt engineering that you only learn by watching non-technical people try to do it: writing the instructions is not the hard part. The hard part is thinking about the task in the abstract . We'd hand a business owner an agent that mostly worked, and say "just adjust the instructions when it gets something wrong." Sounds easy. It is not. Sitting down and imagining all the ways a conversation could go, then writing rules for a machine to follow - that's a skill. It's basically a job. And it's a completely different job from running a flower shop or a real estate office. So they got stuck. They'd open the instructions editor, stare at it, and close it. The agent stayed mediocre because the iteration loop we designed required them to be part-time prompt engineers. A few of them just quietly left. That stung, but it taught us the actual problem. What "iteration" actually looked like We started doing the iterations for them, manually. And once we did that a few dozen times, a pattern jumped out. The feedback never led to an abstract change. It was never something that made us "rethink the agent's persona" or "restructure the system prompt." It was tiny, concrete, and tied to a real conversation: "It suggests all of our services, but honestly most customers only care about these three - push those." "It pulled our opening hours from the website and they're just wrong. We changed them months ago." These were one-line corrections. The owner knew ex

This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam ( https://dev.to/challenges/june-game-jam-2026-06-03 ) What I Built I built Solstice Assassin, a tactical stealth-action game set inside a collapsing digital mainframe. You play as Alex, a self-aware digital anomaly trapped inside the Solstice Grid, a secure virtual system originally created by Alan Turing. Alex awakens with almost no memory except one critical piece of information: «CREATOR: ALAN TURING» The catch? Today is the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, and at midnight the system will execute a complete purge of all dynamic data. Alex has one final day to recover lost memories, outsmart the system's security forces, and find a way to survive. Gameplay combines tactical movement, stealth, procedural level generation, enemy AI, and resource management. Players infiltrate security sectors, collect awareness data, avoid or eliminate hostile "Cleaners", and manage powerful abilities such as Dash, Cloak, Radar, and Time Warp. The Solstice theme isn't just part of the story—it directly affects gameplay. Throughout each mission, the system progresses through different Solar Phases: 🌅 Golden Dawn ☀️ High Noon 🌇 Crimson Sunset 🌑 Eclipse Each phase changes visibility, stealth effectiveness, enemy behavior, and the overall tactical landscape. High Noon makes players highly exposed, while Crimson Sunset rewards stealth and careful planning. By the time Eclipse arrives, the entire system begins breaking down. My goal was to create a game where the passing of the longest day isn't just a background theme but something the player constantly feels through the mechanics themselves. Video Demo https://youtu.be/48RM1iTZjOg?si=JYz86wVzNMjeZmmw In the video I demonstrate: Tactical movement and infiltration Dynamic Solar Phase transitions Enemy AI behavior and pathfinding Awareness recovery and progression systems Alex's abilities AI-generated mission briefings and voice interactions Procedural level generation End-o