Sampling like Kanye

Kanye doesn't sit down and compose from nothing. He digs through crates, finds a two-second loop from a 1973 soul record nobody's heard in decades, and flips it into something that feels completely new — and completely his. That's not laziness. That's taste applied to theft applied to craft. I've been thinking about how the same instinct shows up in how I build software. Every time I reach for a library, copy a pattern from a codebase I admire, or adapt an architecture decision I read about in a blog post — I'm sampling. The question isn't whether to sample. It's whether you know what you're doing with it. This post is about building a personal portfolio with TanStack Start and a carefully chosen stack, and how almost every decision in it was a flip of something that already existed. BetterAuth instead of Clerk. Umami instead of a paid analytics SaaS. Open-source over lock-in, everywhere I could manage it. Not because I'm dogmatic about it, but because those samples fit the beat I was trying to make.

--- Generated by Claude.