New Laptop, New Job, and Two Weeks of Not Touching My Invoice App

So it has been roughly two weeks since my last post and a lot happened. Not in a "shipped three features" way. More in a "life moved fast and I was just trying to keep up" kind of way.

Let me just get into it.

I Got a MacBook Air M5

This one still feels a bit surreal to write.

I did not ask for it. My parents saw me at a point where they felt confident enough to say okay, this is a good investment. And they just got it. The MacBook Air M5.

I have been building on a setup that was honestly not great for a while now. So when I opened the box I genuinely did not know how to react. It felt less like buying a laptop and more like someone placing a bet on you. That kind of thing does something to you. Makes you not want to waste it.

I Took a Part Time Job

This is the bigger news.

I joined an international freight forwarding company as a Pricing and Tech Associate. Part time. And before you ask, yes I know that is a strange combination of words for a job title. That is sort of the point.

I want to be clear about why I chose this over an internship. An internship is where you learn. A job, even a part time one, is where you implement. There is a real difference. In an internship someone is usually holding your hand through the process. Here there are live business problems and someone actually expects me to solve them. That felt more valuable to me right now.

I Have Been Going to Shipment Hubs

My boss has been taking me around to understand the industry from the ground up. I have been to the Aramex hub. I am going to the FedEx hub soon.

I know this sounds completely disconnected from everything I usually write about. But hear me out.

I have been learning things like port to port delivery vs door to door. How a shipment actually gets processed. The steps involved. The players. The friction points. And I think this is genuinely important because we as software engineers can only build things that actually help people when we understand the problem. Not the surface version of the problem. The real version. The one you only see when you are inside it.

The best micro SaaS ideas do not come from browsing Product Hunt. They come from being inside an industry and noticing the thing that makes no sense or takes way too long or still runs on a spreadsheet when it should not.

I have only been here a few weeks and I am already noticing things.

My Job Title Means I Do Everything

This is either a feature or a bug depending on how you look at it.

I am building a website with a CMS. I am doing LinkedIn content strategy for the business. I am thinking through growth strategy. And I have been tasked with building a price predictor system.

That last one is the most technically interesting.

Right now the biggest friction point for the business is response time. A client asks for a quote. The team has to manually figure out the best price across different carriers, routes, and conditions. It takes time. And in freight forwarding, slow response time costs you deals.

So my job is to build something that gives the best price as fast as possible.

My first instinct was linear regression. Made sense on paper. I have some data, I want to predict a number, sounds like a regression problem. But after digging into it I quickly realized that was not going to work well here. Freight pricing has too many variables, too many non-linear relationships, too much going on for a simple linear model to capture it properly.

After going down a proper rabbit hole with AI and other resources I landed on XGBoost. It handles mixed data types well, it is strong on tabular data, and it does not need a massive dataset to start giving reasonable outputs. I had never worked with ML before this job. Now I am building an ML model. That is a strange sentence to write but here we are.

I Have Also Been Building N8N Automations

Part of simplifying internal processes means automating the repetitive stuff. I have been setting up workflows in n8n to handle things that were previously done manually. Nothing I can go into detail on right now but it is good practice and it is directly solving real problems for real people inside a real business. That hits differently than building a personal project.

What About Invoicepedia

Honestly? I have not touched it in two weeks.

And I am not going to pretend that is fine or spin it into some lesson about rest. It just happened. Life got full and the invoice app sat there.

But I am not worried about it. The foundation is solid, I know what I want to build next, and I will get back to it.

If anything, this job is making me think harder about what Invoicepedia should eventually become. Because now I am watching a real business deal with real operational friction every day. That is going to make the product thinking sharper when I come back to it.

The Honest Bit

I know the conventional advice is to go deep on one thing. Pick a lane. Build expertise in a vertical.

And I get that. I genuinely do.

But I am also at an age where I think variety is the better bet. Not scattered, unfocused variety. Intentional variety. I am doing case competitions. I am building software. I am inside a logistics company learning how a real industry operates. Each of those things is teaching me something the others cannot.

I have been competing in case competitions for a while now and there is always this gap between the recommendations you put in a slide deck and what actually happens when you try to execute them. This job is closing that gap. There are actual stakes. Actual outcomes. A client either gets their quote fast or they do not.

That is worth something even if it does not fit neatly on a resume.

My boss has worked at Aramex, UPS, FedEx, Jeena, DG Group. The kind of experience that takes decades to build. I am sitting next to that and asking questions. I would be an idiot not to.

If you are a freight or logistics person and you have thoughts on XGBoost for pricing models I would genuinely love to hear them. This is new territory for me.

And if you want the longer, more personal version of what this past two weeks has felt like, I wrote about it on my personal blog.

Will keep posting. Back to building soon.