A project is more than its screenshot

A screenshot shows the surface. The decisions that made the project worth building live underneath it.

A portfolio card has room for one image, one sentence and a few tags. That is fine for a first look. It is not the project.

The project is the part you cannot see in the picture. Why the data lives in SQLite instead of a service. Why the filter runs in ten lines of vanilla JavaScript instead of a framework island. Why the fonts are self-hosted. Each of those was a choice with a trade-off, and the trade-off is the interesting part.

So this section exists. Short notes on the decisions behind the work, written while the reasons are still fresh.