Topic
Shipping and operating my own product in public — one jar serving two hosts, making it findable, dropping experiments into it, shipping a free CV builder off the side.
I chose a flat ZB monogram, rebuilt it as SVG, and carried it across my portfolio, blog and FOCUS headers. Here are the design choices, the shared-asset surprises, and the checks behind the release.
A new identity for my portfolio, writing, and independent products: graphite, electric blue, and a moving Z inspired by event-driven systems. The design choices, reusable article templates, and engineering constraints behind it.
I got annoyed at 'free' CV builders that paywall the download button, so I built one that is actually free: a guided wizard with a live A4 preview, French and English, and a PDF that never touches my server. Here is the product thinking, the architecture, and the near-outage a code review caught.
A 5 minute experiment: wiring Alibaba's page-agent into my career site and pointing it at DeepSeek, so the whole UI takes orders in plain English. How it works under the hood, what its reasoning traces actually look like, and why I kept it strictly local.
A Domain property covers your apex and every subdomain from a single DNS TXT record — if you place it right. Here is the split-field mistake that fails the first verify, and the one command that catches it before you click.
AI agents are a new kind of reader, and they don't want your rendered HTML. llms.txt is a tiny Markdown convention that hands them a clean index instead. Here's what it is, why it matters now, and how I wired it into my own Spring Boot site, with one URL path serving two different files by host.
How I added a public, server-rendered blog to a login-gated CV site without a second app or container — one jar, two hostnames, and a host-dispatch filter.
Posts that touch this subject but live under another topic.
A generated character only becomes an identity when it survives the next prompt. I turned one navy-hoodie mascot, two successful references and a --manga switch into a small reusable Codex skill.
Security and privacy, in practice
My kanban board had no authentication at all and handed its entire database to any caller. Putting it on focus.zakaria.lu meant a fourth host on the jar that was already running - plus a disclosure bug caught in review, and one cookie dot that 500'd every sign-in.