Jorge Polanco · Backend & Systems

I build tools that tell you the truth about your systems.

Backend and distributed-systems engineer. Most of what follows is about making invisible things visible — debt that outlived its deadline, a request that failed three services ago, a trading strategy that didn't work and said so.

Selected work

01

DebtWatchReleased · npm

A CLI that makes intentional technical debt time-bound. Every deliberate shortcut carries a reason, an owner, and an expiration date; CI enforces that new debt has all three. Read-only by design — it never edits your code or closes debt for you.

Go · npm distribution via per-platform binaries · SARIF · 50+ languages
Apache-2.0 · four platforms verified · scans its own source in its own pipeline

The hardest decision

Expired debt deliberately does not fail your pull request.

If a passing date could red a build, an engineer with an unrelated one-line change eats a failure on a Monday for someone else's debt — on a day nobody changed anything. That check gets deleted within a month. So expiry is enforced by a scheduled run instead: the PR gate stays deterministic, and the deadline still has teeth somewhere that can't block an unrelated merge.

02

ConsensusIQLive

A prediction-market evidence dashboard, and a controlled trading experiment run against pre-registered criteria. Immutable catalog snapshots four times a day, a quality-gated public dashboard, and paper strategies whose every decision, fee, stale quote and loss is recorded append-only.

Next.js · scheduled ingestion · append-only ledger · scientific controls

The hardest decision

Publishing the negative result.

The evaluation criteria were registered before the strategies ran, and nothing is revised after the fact. The experiment did not find an edge — and the honest way to report that is to publish the ledger anyway, losses included. A portfolio of only successes tells you nothing about how someone handles being wrong.

03

RoundupShipped · retired

A daily word-grouping puzzle for iOS and Android, tied to a public debt-payoff journey. Built to learn mobile delivery end to end and taken all the way there — playable game, streaks, leaderboards, email OTP auth, and a schema with row-level security covered by 52 database assertions. Retired on purpose once it had taught what it was built to teach.

React Native · Expo · Supabase · Postgres RLS · Edge Functions · pgTAP · Vitest

The hardest decision

The client is never trusted to score its own game.

An Edge Function loads the canonical puzzle server-side, derives the outcome and mistake count itself, and marks the row server_validated. Scoring on the device would have been far less work — and would have made every leaderboard number meaningless the first time someone opened the debugger.

04

Flight RecorderPre-release

Self-hosted, record-level debugging for distributed workflows. Search for one entity and reconstruct its journey across webhook, transformation, database, queue, worker and third-party API — with field-level diffs showing where a value actually changed.

TypeScript · Fastify · Postgres · SQS-compatible queue · Next.js · Playwright
33 architecture decision records

The hardest decision

Auditing it hard enough to conclude it wasn't ready.

A structured adversarial review of the first-contact experience produced 30 claims; 28 survived a refutation pass. It found that the diff engine — the actual product — silently mishandled dates and shared references, meaning it could report "no fields changed" when a field had changed. Shipping was the easy option. The work is sequenced by what makes the next defect observable, not by severity.

05

SignalDeskPrototype

A command center for founders that turns scattered customer feedback into ranked product decisions — clustering messy signals from support, sales, reviews and notes into evidence-backed decision briefs.

Next.js App Router · Supabase · encrypted per-workspace credentials
OpenAI and Anthropic adapters · Linear, HubSpot, Slack sync · Playwright

The hardest decision

Making the product evaluable at zero cost.

Bring-your-own-key AI plus cached demo outputs, so someone can walk the entire workflow without a key, a bill, or a sales call. An AI product that requires spending money before you can tell whether it's useful mostly measures how much you already trusted it.

Also

  • Mindmint

    A free daily puzzle hub. Deterministic client-side generation — no backend, no accounts, nothing to sign up for.

  • Design records

    Numbered decisions with rationale, rejected alternatives and stated costs — the reasoning behind DebtWatch, written down as it was made.