Field notes

Field notes

Writing on design, systems, and calmer web craft.

Writing on design, systems, and calmer web craft.

A small journal of decisions, constraints, and behind-the-scenes notes from building sharper digital products in Framer.

A small journal of decisions, constraints, and behind-the-scenes notes from building sharper digital products in Framer.

Design notes

Framer craft

Laptop on a wooden desk

Latest essays

5 posts

AI

15 min read

i built a cad editor in the browser, then taught an llm to use it

parsing autocad dwg, reconstructing walls and rooms from anonymous line segments, building a canvas cad editor from scratch, and handing the whole thing to claude as tools it can call

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Systems

8 min read

Your SSH key is already an account: building multiplayer apps over SSH

Every SSH connection proves who the user is before your app runs a byte. I built a small Go framework on that, and here is what treating the key fingerprint as an account makes possible.

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AI

18 min read

Shipping 100,000 construction PDFs a month: what actually breaks

A year of running a document processing pipeline at scale through tender packs, permit applications, site surveys, and A0 drawings. The PDFs themselves rank third on the list of things that break.

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Systems

10 min read

Control plane, data plane, durable storage: structuring a managed search engine in Rust

How I split one search engine into three systems in Rust: Postgres for metadata, tantivy for the index, object storage for durability. The ordering a create request takes, and the quota race it avoids.

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Laptop on a wooden desk
Laptop on a wooden desk

AI

7 min read

Shipping LLM features that survive production

Most LLM features work in the demo and break in the real world. Here is the evaluation layer that keeps them honest — and how to measure 'correct' before you ship.

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Compliance

8 min read

Turning a regulation into testable code

How to take a dense statute from primary source to an audit-ready detector — separating literal text from enforcement practice, and deriving tests from the regulation itself.

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Compliance

9 min read

Building a GDPR-compliant backend: an engineer's checklist

GDPR is usually treated as a legal checkbox bolted on at the end. The decisions that actually carry legal weight are architectural — and they are cheap early, expensive late.

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Compliance

9 min read

The EU AI Act for software engineers: what you actually have to build

The EU AI Act is written for legal teams. Here is the translation into system requirements — risk tiers, the obligations that touch your code, and what to build before the deadlines bite.

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Compliance

8 min read

Implementing the FATF Travel Rule: an engineer's view

The FATF Travel Rule reads simply and implements anything but. The places literal text and enforcement practice diverge — and how to build a transmission layer that survives an audit.

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Compliance

7 min read

Property-based testing for compliance logic

When you can't see the reference corpus, you derive the tests from the regulation itself. How property-based testing makes a rules engine trustworthy on inputs you never hand-wrote.

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Book a call, and I'll take care of the rest

© Arif Dogan 2026. All rights reserved.

Book a call, and I'll take care of the rest

© Arif Dogan 2026. All rights reserved.

Book a call, and I'll take care of the rest

© Arif Dogan 2026. All rights reserved.