Developer Showcase

AI-generated narratives and infographics exploring the development history of selected projects.

All Case Study Deep Dive
All ApplesoftBASIC GEO Auditor Internal Infrastructure Potrace ProjectShowcase Search Operator Website iConquer

development-guidelines: Systematizing Craft Across a Swift Development Practice

A living reference document that encodes hard-won engineering standards — from observability contracts to quality gates — into a single authoritative source that governs every Swift project in the portfolio.

Wiring a Terminal Into a Game Ecosystem: IconquerCLILib

In sixteen days and 65 commits, a single developer built the playable terminal client for a Risk-style strategy game — integrating a multi-package Swift ecosystem, LLM-powered AI opponents, and a full TUI experience into one cohesive command-line tool.

IconquerCore: A Headless Rules Engine Built to Last

A pure-Swift strategy game engine designed for correctness, portability, and long-term client independence — built with a design-first discipline that shows in every architectural choice.

IconquerMatch: Orchestrating Turn-Based Strategy From First Principles

A focused Swift 6 library that separates match lifecycle management from game rules, giving the iConquer ecosystem a single, agent-agnostic conductor for running games end-to-end.

ProjectShowcase: Building a Portfolio Narrative Engine in Swift

A three-stage CLI pipeline that transforms raw git artifacts, package manifests, and design documents into grounded, fact-backed developer portfolio narratives — complete with dependency-free SVG infographics.

QualityGateCore: Building a Plugin-Driven Quality Enforcement Engine for Swift

A deep technical look at how a disciplined design-first workflow produced a modular, CI-ready quality gate system spanning 20+ auditors, multiple output formats, and Swift 6.2's full concurrency model.

Building a Production-Grade Swift MCP Client from First Principles

In under three weeks and 16 commits, a solo developer shipped three versioned releases of a zero-dependency, Swift 6-native Model Context Protocol client that runs across every Apple platform and on the server.

Auditing the Invisible: Building a GEO Compliance Tool for the AI Search Era

A solo developer designed and shipped a full-stack Swift web application that audits how businesses appear in AI-generated search results — before most of the industry had a name for the problem.

Building a Native Swift MCP Server: Protocol-First Infrastructure for AI Tooling

SwiftMCPServer is a ground-up Swift implementation of the Model Context Protocol, giving macOS developers a native, type-safe foundation for exposing tools and resources to AI agents — built with a design-first workflow before a single session was logged.

SwiftCLIKit: Building a Native macOS CLI Framework from First Principles

A solo developer designed and shipped 18 releases of a Swift 6 command-line toolkit — complete with SSH support — across just four days, guided by a rigorous design-first workflow.

SearchOperatorCore: Building a Structured Search Intelligence Layer for AI Agents

A focused five-hour sprint that produced a fully architected, multi-target Swift package exposing structured search operator logic to MCP-compatible AI tooling.

Building a Personal Site as a Swift Package: Owning the Stack End to End

Justin Purnell spent eighteen months turning his personal website into a fully Swift-native publishing system, accumulating 198 commits that trace a developer who refuses to treat infrastructure as someone else's problem.

Building a Judgment Corpus Tool for Organizational Data

A focused Swift utility for constructing and managing a corpus of labeled judgments, built and committed in under four minutes.

Swift Potrace: First-Principles Vector Tracing for the Apple Ecosystem

In under 24 hours and across two releases, one developer built the Swift ecosystem's first native Potrace implementation — derived directly from Selinger's 2003 paper, not the GPL C source — delivering a permissively licensed, concurrency-ready tracing library for Apple platforms and Linux.

IJSCore: Encoding Institutional Judgment into the Development Loop

A single-day architectural sprint that transformed a theoretical framework for AI-assisted governance into a portable, file-based Swift library — before a single production session began.

IconquerGameKit: Laying the Foundation for a Cross-Platform Game Logic Library

A freshly minted Swift 6.2 package that establishes the scaffolding for shared game logic across Apple's entire platform ecosystem.

IconquerClient: A Cross-Platform Swift Networking Client Built for Modern Apple Ecosystems

In roughly two weeks and three focused commits, a lean Swift package took shape — bringing structured networking and async I/O to macOS, iOS, tvOS, and visionOS under a single, well-tested library target.

IconquerMCP: Bridging a Strategy Game Engine to the Model Context Protocol

In under 48 hours across three commits, a focused MCP server wrapper was designed and shipped to expose a pure-Swift Risk-style game engine as a tool-callable interface — complete with a design-first workflow and two versioned releases.

IconquerServer: Laying the Foundation for a Swift NIO Game Backend

A focused greenfield sprint that stood up a documented, tested Swift server target in under 25 minutes, establishing the architectural bones for a multiplayer game backend.

IconquerAI: Building a Deterministic AI Strategy Layer for a Pure-Swift Game Engine

A focused Swift package that delivers reproducible, in-process computer opponents across Apple's entire platform family — without a single network call or LLM dependency in sight.

IconquerUI: Building a Cross-Platform Swift UI Library from the Ground Up

A solo developer shipped a multi-platform Swift UI component library targeting macOS, iOS, tvOS, and visionOS in under four weeks, releasing v0.1.0 as a foundation for the broader Iconquer ecosystem.

Rebuilding a 2002 Classic: iConquer's Swift Resurrection

Justin Purnell is methodically resurrecting a beloved Mac strategy game as a portfolio-quality SwiftUI project, using a TypeScript reference implementation as a behavioral specification and 39 design proposals as the backbone of a design-first TDD discipline.

Building a Retrocomputing Bridge: ApplesoftBASIC for Modern Apple Platforms

A Swift 6 library that brings Applesoft BASIC interpretation to macOS and iOS, designed and documented with architectural rigor from the very first commit.

Bringing Applesoft BASIC Back to Life on Apple Silicon

A solo developer built a native macOS wrapper for the classic Applesoft BASIC interpreter in a single focused evening of work.