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Projects

A focused set of projects with the decisions that mattered: constraints, tradeoffs, and outcomes.

ParkPal

Full-Stack Engineer & Founder

A two-sided marketplace for booking driveway parking near events, with maps-based discovery, real-time messaging, and Stripe checkout on Firebase.

Challenges / tradeoffs

  • Design a scalable data model for events/venues/parking inventory, bookings, and conversations across Firestore + Cloud Functions
  • Build a reliable booking + payments flow (Stripe) with server-side validation, secure webhooks/callables, and clear user state transitions
  • Handle tricky time + timezone logic by standardizing on UTC ISO 8601 timestamps and updating services/components accordingly
  • Implement availability scheduling with automatic conflict detection/resolution (event vs recurring vs manual) to prevent double-booking
  • Operationalize event onboarding with scheduled scraping + a Slack approval workflow to generate high-quality venue/event suggestions

Tech

TypeScript React Vite Firebase (Auth, Firestore, Cloud Functions, Hosting, Storage) Stripe (Checkout + webhooks) Google Maps API (Maps/Geocoding/Timezone) Tailwind CSS Geofire (geospatial querying) Zod (validation) date-fns PostHog (analytics) Vitest / Jest (testing)

Impact

  • Scaled to 60+ users within 3 months, enabling event-goers to discover and reserve nearby driveway parking with secure payments, messaging, and booking management
  • Improved correctness and debuggability by migrating date handling to standardized UTC ISO strings across the app
  • Reduced host scheduling errors by automatically resolving overlapping availability windows with clear priority rules

Versionary

Full-Stack Engineer & Co-Founder

A Google-Docs-like rich text editor with real-time collaboration and Git-style commits + branching, persisted via Supabase.

Challenges / tradeoffs

  • Design a low-latency collaboration architecture (WebSocket collab server + REST backend) that keeps the editor responsive
  • Persist collaborative state safely: bridge CRDT live edits into durable Git snapshots and history
  • Build reliable, secure backend Git operations (commit/history/branches) without native dependencies (migrated from NodeGit → Git CLI)
  • Prevent data loss on refresh/disconnect with caching + snapshotting while keeping bandwidth minimal
  • Implement auth/authorization (Supabase JWT + RLS) and repo lifecycle management (download/upload + cleanup)

Tech

TypeScript React Lexical Yjs (CRDT) Hocuspocus (WebSocket collaboration) TanStack Router TanStack Query Tailwind CSS Node.js Express Supabase (Auth, Postgres, Storage) Git CLI (child_process) Fly.io (deployment)

Impact

  • Enabled multi-user, conflict-free editing with Git-like history (commits + branches) for documents
  • Improved reliability and deployability by removing native git bindings (NodeGit) in favor of Git CLI
  • Reduced accidental data loss via short-term server-side caching and background snapshotting of uncommitted changes

aleczaitz.com

Designer + Engineer

A static, recruiter-focused portfolio built with Astro for speed, clarity, and strong SEO, prioritizing first impressions and maintainability.

Challenges / tradeoffs

  • Ship a clean IA that communicates “who/what/why” in under 5 seconds
  • Keep client JS minimal while supporting dark mode and accessibility
  • Maintain a consistent spacing/typography system across pages

Tech

Astro Tailwind CSS Static generation Semantic HTML

Impact

  • Lighthouse-oriented defaults, simple content model, and easy maintenance

HashingPixels

Solo Developer

A JavaFX app that reduces an image to N dominant colors using a custom hash table, and lets users recolor and export the result.

Challenges / tradeoffs

  • Implement a generic hash table with quadratic probing, rehashing, and probe-count instrumentation to efficiently dedupe/count colors
  • Design an image encoding pipeline: quantize pixel colors, pick the most frequent colors, then remap every pixel to the nearest palette color (RGB distance)
  • Bridge image pipelines cleanly between AWT `BufferedImage` and JavaFX `ImageView` (SwingFXUtils) while keeping the UI responsive and stateful
  • Build a simple, reliable UX for loading images, parameterizing max colors, previewing original vs transformed outputs, and saving PNG exports
  • Write unit + integration tests around core logic to keep the hashing/encoding behavior correct as the algorithm evolves

Tech

Java 21 JavaFX (Controls, FXML, Swing interop) Gradle JUnit 5 ImageIO / BufferedImage Custom HashTable (quadratic probing)

Impact

  • Reduced image palettes to a user-defined number of dominant colors while preserving overall appearance via nearest-color remapping
  • Delivered an interactive side-by-side preview workflow (original vs encoded/recolored) with one-click export to PNG
  • Demonstrated data-structures fluency by applying a custom hash table to real-world image processing and measuring probe behavior