Currently working on an agent-based app family for making recipes easier to manage.

Some core problems I want to solve:

• Super easy recipe collation from multiple sources (images, websites, pdfs, or videos)
• Agent-assisted meal planning
• Smart shopping list creation from meal plans -> using agents to combine ingredients and quantities and organize them by grocery section (e.g. produce, dairy...)

I want to make a platform that will allow anyone to save recipes from anywhere, will put them into a simple but structured data model.

The possibilities are endless and I'm motivated by solving real problems that I face as a father and home cook.

How I'm doing it (so far)

• .NET for the core data model and related MCP tools (e.g. creating recipes, getting ingredients, etc.)
• Next.js for a web app to rapidly prototype real features and flow.
• Mastra.ai for agent orchestration and workflows
• k3s for production-ready (but not overkill) infrastructure and platform.
• Github and Actions for source control and CI/CD
• Postgres as my DB

However things are changing rapidly.

After the core functionality and user management are solid I will focus on an ios app and package the web app as a PWA and/or an installable desktop app.

I'll be blogging about my progress and learnings as I'm learning a lot about how to make actually valuable and cost-effective agent-powered software.

In 2020 I moved to Germany and joined the Planner team at Heidelberg Materials. Check my Tech Lead experience for more details, but Planner filled a gap in the cement planning process - namely factoring in electricity price volatility. By doing so we were able to generate massive savings for the company.

Keep in mind this was mid-covid so I really got a chance to learn about remote work with an international team and didn't see most of my colleagues for over a year.

The work we were doing was unique and really valuable. We didn't just save money, but we aligned the production of cement to use renewables as much as possible. At the scale of Heidelberg Materials any optimization is a huge saving in CO2 emissions worldwide.

At this point it was at the POC phase and I was primarily responsible for the UI.

Some notable personal contributions:

• Refactoring state handling to minimize FE, removed all use of Redux and refactored to use react-query
• Built a lightweight UI logging library that was used across all FE products
• Migrated logging and event tracking from Sentry to Application Insights for all FE products
• Refactored CI for all FE products to use a new unified CI scheme in gitlab ci
• Offloaded heavy calculations and functions to web workers to improve performance by unblocking the main thread.
• Worked on high-performance charts - often by writing svg code directly.
• Introduced modern UI practices like skeleton loaders, bundle splitting, prefetching on link hover, and optimistic updates.

I also touched some backend code during the time, and worked on implementing a new scheduling API for the product that would enable multiplayer planning and scheduling of production slots.

I was pretty proud of setting up the FE for long-term maintainability and scalability - especially when it comes to performance.

The only thing I wish I had pushed for earlier was moving away from Material UI. It's a pretty heavy framework and I've grown to greatly dislike component libraries like this.

I then led the team that supported the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) systems for the organization.

This involved supporting and developing for seven different departments, each with a laundry list of requirements and needs.

One of the most important things I learned during this time was about how important solving things together with stakeholders and communicating expectations well is.

I helped set up a working group around these two massive systems so that the departments and organization could understand and prioritize work together but also by bringing internal developer needs that would allow us to deliver faster.

This involved helping them understand internal timelines and projects like

• Internal upgrades
• Investing in tooling and automated deploys
• Setting up test and staging environments
• Hardening the systems and VMs to high security standards

And then combining them with the priorities of the departments to solve their pain points.

The overall result was not only less fire fighting for the team, but much faster delivery of features and fixes after we were able to clear up our technical and process debt.

Another huge development was setting up training documentation with the different departments to deal with turnover. This involved writing hundreds of pages of documentation and setting up processes to keep it up to date with the corresponding departments.