Read insightful articles by Sam Packer covering software development, tech trends, project experiences, and practical tips. Stay updated and enhance your skills through engaging, informative content.https://sampacker.com/https://sampacker.com/blog/we-built-a-solution-to-gen-zs-loneliness-crisis-at-a-hackathon/https://sampacker.com/blog/we-built-a-solution-to-gen-zs-loneliness-crisis-at-a-hackathon/Two-thirds of college students feel lonely. At Duke's AI Hackathon, we built Sync AI to change that.Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:33:25 GMThttps://sampacker.com/blog/building-risk-based-authentication-for-shibboleth-in-two-weeks/https://sampacker.com/blog/building-risk-based-authentication-for-shibboleth-in-two-weeks/You log into Canvas, your email, and your university portal every day without thinking twice. But the security protecting those logins? It's nowhere near as sophisticated as it should be. So my team and I decided to modernize it.Tue, 04 Nov 2025 15:07:46 GMThttps://sampacker.com/blog/tracing-the-currents-from-flows-to-datacenters/https://sampacker.com/blog/tracing-the-currents-from-flows-to-datacenters/A data storytelling project exploring whether America's growing network of data centers is truly straining the power grid, or if the story in the numbers points to something more complex.Wed, 01 Oct 2025 17:23:39 GMThttps://sampacker.com/blog/how-i-load-balanced-my-portfolio-applications-and-databases/https://sampacker.com/blog/how-i-load-balanced-my-portfolio-applications-and-databases/I self-host my applications. The biggest downside? Downtime during updates and reboots. Here's how I load balanced my entire stack to keep things running, even when a server goes down.Sat, 24 May 2025 19:02:01 GMThttps://sampacker.com/blog/improving-authentication-in-my-projects/https://sampacker.com/blog/improving-authentication-in-my-projects/I rebuilt authentication in two of my applications and learned more about security than I expected along the way.Mon, 05 May 2025 19:08:15 GMThttps://sampacker.com/blog/celebrating-milestones-at-wtamu/https://sampacker.com/blog/celebrating-milestones-at-wtamu/I am honored to have been recognized for academic and leadership excellence at the 2025 Paul and Virginia Engler College of Business Symposium with multiple honors and awards.Thu, 24 Apr 2025 01:02:43 GMThttps://sampacker.com/blog/understanding-how-rendering-works-in-web-development/https://sampacker.com/blog/understanding-how-rendering-works-in-web-development/SSG, SSR, and CSR each solve different problems. Here's how I use all three in my Astro portfolio, and the debugging that taught me which goes where.Wed, 19 Mar 2025 02:02:10 GMThttps://sampacker.com/blog/redesigning-my-experience-page-from-clutter-to-clarity/https://sampacker.com/blog/redesigning-my-experience-page-from-clutter-to-clarity/My experience page was a wall of text. Here's how I redesigned it, and what analytics taught me about how people actually use portfolio sites.Wed, 12 Mar 2025 02:26:12 GMThttps://sampacker.com/blog/why-having-fewer-problems-isnt-always-a-good-thing/https://sampacker.com/blog/why-having-fewer-problems-isnt-always-a-good-thing/If nobody on your team is raising problems, that's not a sign that everything is fine. It's usually a sign that something is wrong.Tue, 25 Feb 2025 15:02:44 GMThttps://sampacker.com/blog/why-i-self-host-instead-of-using-cloudflare/https://sampacker.com/blog/why-i-self-host-instead-of-using-cloudflare/I've hosted my site on Cloudflare, Netlify, and a VPS. Here's what I learned about the tradeoffs between edge services and self-hosting.Mon, 10 Feb 2025 19:39:55 GMThttps://sampacker.com/blog/managing-yourself-comes-before-managing-others/https://sampacker.com/blog/managing-yourself-comes-before-managing-others/What getting my AI Product Manager certification taught me about self-management, and why it matters more than most leadership advice.Sun, 02 Feb 2025 18:25:11 GMT