Last week I crossed my first career milestone in my 4.5 years as a software engineer: a May 2026 layoff. A true badge of a SWE in silicon valley and something I had mentally prepared for. As I am figuring out my next play, I decided to keep the technical coding interview problems and solitions more fresh in my mind by building personal projects. All future personal projects will be under jasmineanica.com/projects/* . Each project has is its own GitHub repo with its own stack and live demo. Adding a new project is one YAML block plus one new repo.

The first one: Implement a Trie solution and understand it’s uses.

Things I learned

  • Empty-state matters in a demo. The README claimed “Trie autocomplete on tags,” but with an empty DB the autocomplete did nothing. I added a lifespan-hook seeder that drops six interview-prep cards on first boot, plus a search box on the home page that actually exercises the Trie via HTMX. Now the claim is visible, not just true.
  • hx-ext="json-enc" is silent if the extension script isn’t loaded. I had the attribute on my form but forgot the <script src=".../json-enc.js"> tag, so HTMX quietly fell back to application/x-www-form-urlencoded, FastAPI couldn’t parse the body as a JSON object, and every Save returned a 422 with model_attributes_type. Two-part fix: load the extension and add a Pydantic field_validator on tags so the same /api/cards endpoint accepts both tags: ["a","b"] (JSON clients) and tags: "a, b" (the form’s single text input).

What’s next

The next project is probably a rate limiter (sliding window or token bucket, Redis-backed), and the loop is documented at /docs/adding-a-project/.

Live demo: sm2-flashcards.onrender.com Code: github.com/jasmineanica/sm2-flashcards