PortfolioEmanuel Dervishi · Journal12 essays

Notes from the workbench

Writing about systems I'm building and questions I'm chasing.

AISecurityRoboticsEngineering

How I am preparing to represent Team Albania at ECSC 2026 across web, pwn, reverse engineering, crypto, and teamwork.

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Archive / 2025—2026

All writing

02
Artificial intelligence

What building NanoLLM taught me about language models

A practical look at tokenization, attention, training, and why implementing a small model changes how you understand AI.

03
Systems

Designing Dotal, a programming language with Albanian syntax

The decisions behind Dotal's lexer, parser, syntax tree, and interpreter—and what language design teaches beyond syntax.

04
Cybersecurity

The security checks an AI-built SaaS needs before launch

A practical launch review for authentication, authorization, billing, secrets, APIs, and data access in modern SaaS products.

05
Product engineering

Decision software should show its assumptions

Why Continium presents branches, drivers, and tradeoffs instead of hiding uncertainty behind one confident answer.

06
Robotics

DexHand: turning camera input into physical motion

How computer vision, gesture recognition, ROS2, ESP32, and servo control connect inside an intelligent robotic hand.

07
Full-stack

What contract projects taught me about full-stack delivery

Lessons from shipping one-time and ongoing client projects: scope, architecture, communication, and owning the complete result.

08
Cybersecurity

A practical threat model for a Next.js SaaS

A lightweight method for mapping assets, actors, trust boundaries, and abuse paths before a modern web product launches.

09
Architecture

Architecting a small multi-product SaaS company

How I think about shared infrastructure, product boundaries, and avoiding both duplication and premature platform engineering.

10
Developer tools

Locality and the case for calmer developer workflows

Why local development tools should reduce context switching, expose state clearly, and stay out of the developer's way.

11
hackathon

ElevenLabs × Project Europe Hackathon — Warsaw

Our team competed in the ElevenLabs × Project Europe hackathon in Warsaw — a next‑level AI hackathon focused on voice and AI agents.

12
escs

ECSC 2025 — Competing with Team Albania

Highlights from ECSC 2025, representing Albania in cybersecurity, and the key challenges we tackled.