Shaaf Kashan

The Realm: House Vaelwright

a builder's allegory. "Before the Stone, the Plan."

House Vaelwright is a small creative allegory — a way to talk about how I build. The house, its creed and its stations are invented; the Great Works below are real projects, and each links to the actual case study.

The conceit is simple: a line of builders who set no stone before the plan is true. The hold is being raised at first light — trench and scaffold, arch and mast — because the order of the work is where a builder's habits actually show.

The builders' creed

  • Measure twice; raise once.
  • A wall is only as true as the plan beneath it.
  • The keystone bears what the builder's hands forget.

The stations

  • The Drafting Table (Plan before stone.) Every raising starts here, on vellum: context, constraints, decisions, trade-offs — the whole structure drawn before a single stone is cut. It is the house words made practical: the expensive mistakes are the ones you pour concrete over.
  • The Foundation Trench (Constraints are the ground you build on.) Before the first course is laid, the ground is read: what must hold, what cannot move, who will live in the thing. WealthSphere was trenched this way — sensitive financial data treated as a first-class constraint, auth and access control designed before features, and every screen shaped for a non-technical user.
  • The Mason's Yard (Choose materials for the load, not the fashion.) In the yard, stone is chosen for what it must bear — never for how it catches the light. A stack is a set of load decisions: what carries state, what carries trust, what carries change.
  • The Unfallen Arch (Find the load-bearing decision early.) Two half-spans reach for each other; the keystone waits on its sledge, cut and ready. Every system has one decision the rest will lean on. TerraGrid's was the split between the ML valuation engine and the immutable ledger — made first, so everything after had something true to bear on.
  • The Vault of Plans (Keep every plan; learn from the unbuilt ones.) Every design the house draws is kept — including the ones never raised. A plan set aside is not a failure; it is a debt paid early, and the vault is where the next raising goes to get wiser.
  • The Banner Mast (Raise the banner only when it stands.) The mast is bare until the work can bear weight without excuses. When the banner goes up, it means: tested, shipped, and stood behind — outcomes and evidence, not intentions.

The Great Works

  • TerraGrid: AI + blockchain property platform · final-year project. Values land with an ML valuation model and records ownership on an immutable blockchain ledger — so a valuation isn't guesswork, and an ownership transfer leaves a public record (demonstrated end to end on the Sepolia testnet). Unifies a React frontend, an ML valuation engine, and Solidity smart contracts into one coherent product. Graded A+. Full token-based ownership lifecycle demonstrated end-to-end on the Sepolia testnet.
  • WealthSphere: Personal-finance & financial-literacy platform · Year-2 Scrum group project. Brings budgeting, investment tracking, and financial literacy into one platform a non-technical user can navigate — financial data encrypted at rest and in transit, built on Spring Security so auth and access control are first-class. Graded A* on the individual project portfolio. Built as a Scrum group project with rotating Product Owner and Scrum Master roles.
  • SWIFTBOT: First-year robotics group project · Java on a Raspberry Pi robot. A first-year team project on a SwiftBot — a Raspberry Pi robot. Takes a robot task from requirements and design (flowcharts, pseudocode) through to a working object-oriented Java implementation, with input, task logic, and output cleanly separated and independently testable. Graded A. A working robot task built in Java and demonstrated live in a viva.