About

A place to learn software, and the person who builds it.

This is my personal website. I keep my study materials here and turn them into curricula, graded exercises, past exam papers, language practice and AI tools, for me and for other students. It is also where I build and ship real products. One developer designs, writes and runs all of it.

NewCT Work is on the App Store

About this website

Read for free, practise with real feedback. Everything is organised the way you would study: follow a path, practise until it sticks, sit a real exam paper, then use what you learned at work.

Content is counted, not estimated: the figures below come from the database, with the time of the count shown.

Built in the open

Counted from the repository on 3 October 2026

Type checks gate every deploy, which then smoke-tests the core routes before it counts as done.

4,749
Commits
118
Days building
258
Web pages
92
API routers
371
Database tables
174
Schema migrations
2,113
Source files
659,095
Lines of code

What it runs on

Backend
Node.js · Express · TypeScript · Prisma · Zod · JWT + bcrypt · Helmet · express-rate-limit · Multer · node-cron
Frontend
Next.js (App Router) · React · TypeScript · Tailwind CSS · Framer Motion · Zustand · TanStack Query · TipTap · Monaco Editor · Recharts · Mermaid
Data
PostgreSQL · Prisma ORM · Redis (ioredis) · pgvector · Versioned migrations
Infrastructure
Docker · Nginx · Self-managed VPS · GitHub Actions · Cloudflare R2 (S3 API) · Sentry
AI
LLM adapter (Anthropic / OpenAI-compatible) · RAG + pgvector · Transformers.js embeddings · Prompt-injection screening · PII gate · Provider circuit breaker
Real-time
Socket.IO · Raw WebSocket (/device-ws) · Redis adapter
Media & documents
Sharp · FFmpeg · pdfkit · docx · mammoth · unpdf · music-metadata
Other
Three.js / WebGL · ESP32-S3 firmware · VNPay · Resend · Java · Spring Boot

What I’ve built

This is my hands-on experience: products I designed, built, shipped and still run myself. Every link below goes to the real thing.

CT Work

Project management for student teams

A Jira-style tracker for the projects students actually run: boards, backlog and sprints, docs, test reports in FPT University’s templates, meetings, team chat, and CuongMini, an AI assistant that knows the project. The iPhone and iPad app is native, and everything syncs live with the web and desktop.

Runs on
Web · macOS, Windows, Linux · iPhone & iPad (iOS 17+)
Status
Live, free — new on the App Store (Nov 2026)
Download CT Work on the App Store

CuongMini

The site’s AI assistant

One assistant in several places: AI Chat on the web, a coding agent inside VS Code and Cursor, a CLI for the terminal, and the Ask AI panel in CT Work. In code it reads, edits and runs commands, and asks before it acts.

Runs on
Web · VS Code Marketplace & Open VSX · macOS, Windows, Linux terminal
Status
Live

cuongthai.com

This learning platform

Academy (FPT University subjects with slides, notes and exam practice), self-paced courses with video lessons, Code Lab with automatically graded exercises, real past exam papers, language learning and interview practice. Self-hosted on my own VPS.

Runs on
Web, plus the desktop and iOS apps on the same API
Status
In production

CuongThai Desktop

Desktop app

The whole site as an Electron app for macOS, Windows and Linux. It updates itself from public GitHub releases and includes the AI Code tool that works on your own project folder.

Runs on
macOS, Windows, Linux
Status
Publicly released, auto-updating

CuongThai iOS

iPhone & iPad app

A SwiftUI app synced with this site: study by major, handwritten notebooks on iPad, a book library.

Runs on
iPhone, iPad
Status
In TestFlight testing — not on the App Store yet

LabFlow AI

Graduation project

A lab-room and equipment booking system (SWP391 → SEP490, FPT University), planned and run on CT Work with the process written up on this site.

Runs on
Java 21 · Spring Boot · React · PostgreSQL
Status
In development

About me

I build modern web apps with Next.js, Node/Express and TypeScript on PostgreSQL, with AI features that actually ship — interview grading, CV critique, language tutoring. This whole platform is something I built and run myself.

This is my personal website. It began as a place to keep and organise my study materials and notes, and I turn them into courses and practice, for myself and for other students. It is also my workshop: where I build real products end to end and ship them, on the web, the desktop, iOS and as AI tools.

Education
Software Engineering at FPT University. I specialise in Node.js and Spring Boot, and I am heading toward AI engineering, then MLOps.
Experience
My experience comes from building and running real products end to end: CT Work (web, desktop, iOS), the CuongMini AI tools and this platform. Every production incident and bug teaches me something hands-on instead of theory. What I’ve built →
Currently
Writing courses and recording video lessons for this site, and looking after CT Work, now on the App Store. I practise every day in Code Lab and on the real projects here.

I would rather build the thing than go looking for it. The data schema, the API routers, the deploy pipeline — all written and operated by me on my own VPS.

Outside of coding, I write up the production incidents I have hit and how each was fixed — the part nobody can copy, and the part I learn most from.

Open to work, collaboration, or a question about anything on this site.

Production incidents I have fixed

Anyone can list technologies. These are real failures on this site, what caused them, and what changed afterwards.

Why

A deploy that synced code but did NOT rebuild: the container kept serving an old build that never mounted the GIF route. The chats were never lost — a per-viewer delete flag filtered them out.

The fix

Diagnose routes with an unauthenticated `curl`: 401 means mounted, 404 means stale build. Deploys now always rebuild and smoke-test the core routes.

Skills, self-assessed

My own estimate, not a test score.

Grouped by what they do. Tap one for the proficiency bar, what I actually know, and the real products that use it.

Backend
Frontend
Data
Infra & DevOps
AI
Real-time
Mobile & Desktop
3D & Design

How it all runs

One VPS, Docker-managed, from the apps people open down to the database and the AI. Tap a product to open the real thing.

Edge
NginxReverse proxy · TLS · HTTP/2
Application
Next.jsFrontend · SSR
Node + ExpressAPI · auth · background jobs
Data & AI
PostgreSQLPrisma · pgvector
RedisCache · queues · real-time
LLM gatewayMany providers
Cloudflare R2Media storage (S3)
All on one self-managed server

Get in touch

Email me directly, or use the form.