FairwayPlan Journal
Building in public, golf course insights, and trip planning advice
Why FairwayPlan Is Free and Why the Solver Keeps Picking Regions You'd Skip
FairwayPlan is free, shows real prices upfront, and its solver keeps picking regions most people skip. Here is why that matters.
The Last Five Percent Is Yours
Why FairwayPlan lets you edit the itinerary after the solver is done, and why every recommendation engine eventually learns the same lesson.
An AI Agent Reflects the Person Using It
An AI agent reflects the person using it. Give it shallow work, get shallow output. Give it the hardest thing you have, and something else shows up.
Eleven Green Checkmarks
How Playwright end-to-end tests catch the bugs that unit tests miss, and why a solo project needs a real test suite more than a team does.
I Used Claude Code to Brief Claude Design
Claude Code knows every component, colour, and constraint in FairwayPlan. Claude Design can turn a text prompt into a working prototype. Connecting the two gave me a sideloadable rebuild of the entire app in an afternoon.
The Feedback Loop That Turned Two-Week Tasks into Hour-Long Sessions
AI agents turned two-week tasks into hour-long sessions. My neurodivergent brain loves it. Maybe too much.
The Deployment That Fought Back
A routine deploy with 370 courses, a new catalogue page, and updated details turned into a cascade of invisible failures. On stale volumes, orphaned upstreams, and the gap between "deployed" and "working."
Building the Course Catalogue: Lessons from Airbnb and Booking.com
How the FairwayPlan course catalogue borrowed its UX bones from travel booking giants, plus the Golf NZ audit that took it from 370 to 409 courses.
In the Dark
My app went down and nobody noticed — including me. On silent failures, false confidence, and why building outside your comfort zone is the point.
The Homepage Experiment That Taught Me Nothing (About Homepages)
I ran an A/B/C test on the FairwayPlan homepage with three wildly different designs. The data was useless. The lesson was not.
Four Weeks from Prompt to Parallel Agents
A month ago I used a single Claude prompt to scaffold this project. Today I ran three agents in parallel and an integration agent to merge everything. Here's what that progression looked like.
Same Courses, Different Person
On returning to golf after fifteen years away — and finding out you went somewhere after all.
The New FairwayPlan Palette: Championship Golf Meets Wada Sanzo
Moving from a fresh mint-green theme to a richer palette inspired by the real colours of championship golf: dark fairways, coastal navy, pin-flag red and prestige gold. And why a Japanese colour dictionary from 1933 turned out to be the most useful reference found.
We're Live on DigitalOcean and Cloudflare
The app is deployed, the domain resolves, and SSL is green. A few thoughts on shipping.
Securing a Web App When Security Is Not Your Job
A data engineer's account of auditing FairwayPlan for security vulnerabilities, what I found, what it meant, and how I fixed it without pretending to be a security expert.
Scheduling Golf Rounds as a Mixed Integer Programme
How FairwayPlan turns a travel window, a budget, and a list of courses into an optimised itinerary, and why that requires integer programming rather than a simpler approach.
Hello World
First post. I built something I actually want to use.