Melvin.

Writing
and notes.

Build notes on data and web work, hackathon weekends, and the occasional lesson learned the hard way.

10 of 10
Jul 20267 min readDatabricks Will Now Build Your Pipeline For You. It Still Can't Know That Australia Has Eight States.At Data + AI Summit 2026 Databricks shipped an AI that builds pipelines from a prompt and an agent that finds and fixes production failures. I'm studying for their cert and I think it's genuinely impressive. It also would not have caught the bug that broke my last dashboard, and the reason why is the whole job.Data EngineeringData AnalysisJul 20269 min readI Built My Own Web Analytics Because I Wanted the Raw Event TableUmami's free tier let me collect my data but not query it. So I replaced it with 40 lines of tracker, one Postgres table, and a pile of SQL, and learned more about metric definitions than any dashboard tool would have taught me.Data EngineeringData AnalysisJul 202610 min readMy Dashboard Looked Finished. Three of Its Numbers Were Lying.I built an end-to-end pipeline on real ABS labour force data, Python, Azure SQL, Power BI. It rendered beautifully. It was also double-counting the population, showing a page that was four years out of date, and quietly missing two Australian territories. None of it threw an error.Data AnalysisData EngineeringJun 202610 min readThe BG3 Build That Made Me Feel Like a Villain: Swords Bard 10/1/1I've been playing the Control Martial Swords Bard in Baldur's Gate 3 and it's genuinely the most satisfying build I've run. Full caster. Competitive martial. Paralyses everything. Here's the complete breakdown.RandomJun 20264 min readClaude Design Is the Fastest Way I've Found to Go From Idea to FrontendAnthropic's new Claude Design product genuinely changes how fast you can build UI. I used it to prototype the hero section of this portfolio. Here's what works, what doesn't, and where I still reach for the keyboard.Software EngineeringJun 20264 min readHonest Review: Google Data Analytics Professional CertificateI completed it in 3 months. The BigQuery section is genuinely great, the SQL modules are painfully slow if you already know what you're doing, and it's exactly what it says it is, a course for beginners.Data AnalysisMar 20265 min readPeersuade: How We Won UNIHACK 2026 with a Debate Game About NothingWe built a real-time 1v1 debate game where AI voters judge a fictional Australian election. It won Most Fun Idea and an Honorable Mention for Best Design at Australia's largest student hackathon. Here's how it happened.HackathonSoftware EngineeringJan 23, 20256 min readBuilding OnlyCode: A Peer-to-Peer Coding Platform Hackathon ExperienceMy experience building OnlyCode, a gamified peer-to-peer coding platform that brings back the human element to algorithm practice, during an intense hackathon weekend.HackathonSoftware EngineeringDec 15, 20244 min readMy Portfolio is Live: Here's What I LearnedAfter building this portfolio from scratch with Next.js and shadcn/ui, here are the key lessons I learned about modern web development and what's coming next.Software EngineeringDec 1, 20242 min readHello World!Testing out my new blog system built with Next.js and TypeScript. Time to see if all those components and helper functions actually work!Software Engineering