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The Paperwork (and Money) Between Me and Twenty People

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It started with Google deciding that sideloading needed a gate. Not Play Store curation — that's old news, that's the deal you always made with the Store. This is different: I own the phone. I paid for it. Android's entire decade-long pitch against Apple was built on the idea that owning the hardware meant you got to decide what ran on it, not a walled garden deciding for you — that's the whole reason "hand a friend an APK and they install it" used to just work. Now the operating system itself checks whether the developer behind that APK has been vetted before it'll let you use the thing you bought. Doesn't matter if you're on the Store. Doesn't matter if you're one guy sharing a game with one friend. The OS checks first. That's the thing that kicked all of this off. Everything after is just what happens when you go looking for the exit and find out there isn't one — there's a fee, on top of the one I already paid years ago to b...
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Bite Back: Reimagining Weight Loss Without the Numbers

  There’s something fundamentally broken about how we approach weight loss. As a software engineer, I’m trained to optimize systems. But when I look at the “system” most people use to lose weight—calories, macros, daily weigh-ins—it doesn’t feel optimized at all. It feels like psychological warfare. We’ve built an entire culture around numbers. Calories in. Calories out. Macros hit or missed. Weight up or down. And if you’ve ever tried to follow it perfectly, you know how it ends. Failure. Not because you’re incapable—but because the system demands perfection. And perfection is unsustainable. The Real Problem: Perfection Most weight loss tools don’t fail because they lack data. They fail because they overwhelm you with it. You’re not just trying to eat better. You’re trying to: Track every calorie Hit exact macro targets Log every workout perfectly Monitor every fluctuation on the scale Miss one thing, and suddenly it feels like you’ve failed the entire day. So what happens? You st...
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Welcome to the Workshop

I'm Demortes, a software engineer based in Omaha with a decade-plus of experience building software across the stack. By day, I work in enterprise development; by night, I tinker with game engines, mod frameworks, and whatever interesting problem catches my attention. My primary languages are C# and TypeScript—a combination that serves me well whether I'm building robust backend services with ASP.NET Core, crafting React frontends, or diving into game development with Unreal Engine 5. I'm comfortable working across the full development lifecycle, from database design and API architecture to UI implementation and deployment pipelines. Game development has become a particular passion. There's something uniquely satisfying about the intersection of systems design, real-time performance constraints, and player experience that keeps pulling me back. I run a small indie studio where I'm exploring what's possible when you combine solid engineering fundamentals with c...
Location: Nebraska, USA
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