Task. Standing up an actual technical‑support capability — one that could serve a large and still‑growing client base — was the job.

Action. A Technical Support department got built from nothing. That meant deciding how it would actually work before hiring into it — the process for how a request came in and got resolved, the tooling to handle volume, the standard for what good support looked like — and then building the capacity to deliver IT support and troubleshooting to a lot of clients at once. Starting from scratch was the advantage, honestly; it could be designed for the scale the company was heading toward instead of patching something that had grown up by accident.

Result. The department ended up serving over ten thousand clients with reliable support and troubleshooting. Support went from a thing done reactively to a genuine strength of the company — something that scaled with the client base instead of buckling under it.

Task. Managing the team that delivered all that was the job, and keeping the quality consistent whether it was a quiet week or everything arriving at once.

Action. The team ran IT support, data recovery and hardware repair for over a thousand clients. A lot of that was the organising underneath — making sure work got picked up and not dropped, setting a standard for what “fixed” actually meant so people weren’t getting half‑repairs back, and keeping the team effective when the queue was long. Data recovery especially is work you can’t be casual about; it’s usually someone’s photos or their business sitting on that drive, and they’re already having a bad day by the time they reach you.

Result. The team served over a thousand clients and built a real reputation for reliable service. In that kind of business the reputation is everything — people come back, and they tell others, precisely because the last time something broke you actually sorted it.

Task. Configuring and deploying those routers to give clients better network access and performance was the job.

Action. A thousand Wi‑Fi routers got configured and deployed. The trick at that number is standardising the setup — a consistent, secure, sensible configuration — rather than tuning each one from scratch on the day, because a thousand hand‑crafted routers is a thousand different things to support later. So they were set up for security and performance the same way each time, and rolled out reliably across client sites.

Result. The thousand routers gave clients dependable wireless — better access, better performance — and did it consistently, because the setup was standard rather than improvised. A router nobody has to think about again is the goal; most of these got there.

Task. Managing those repairs was the job — keeping problems getting resolved quickly and, just as importantly, correctly.

Action. Four thousand computer repairs went through — diagnosing the hardware and software faults, organising the workflow so machines moved through instead of piling up, and holding the quality so a repair was actually done right rather than sent back out to fail again next week. A repair that comes back is worse than a slow one; it costs the client a second trip and costs the shop the trust. So the throughput mattered, but never at the expense of fixing it the first time.

Result. All four thousand got resolved, and quickly. People got their machines back working and got on with things, and the company’s name for dependable service held up — which in a repair shop is the whole business.

Task. Keeping the platform’s infrastructure available around the clock was the job — genuinely around the clock, not “business hours plus an on‑call rota nobody answers.”

Action. 24/7 support ran for roughly a thousand servers, plus a good number of client‑owned systems on top of that — administering them, monitoring them, keeping them secured and configured across the whole streaming estate. Because customers sat in three very different time zones, “after hours” didn’t really exist; a problem at 3am local was primetime for someone else, so it got treated as primetime. A lot of the work was noticing something drifting before it became an outage, because on a live streaming platform you don’t get to fix things quietly after the fact.

Result. The platform stayed continuously available for a global audience, with problems caught and dealt with at whatever hour they turned up, before they reached a viewer’s screen. On a 24/7 service that’s the whole job — success looks like nothing happening, which is exactly what the viewers wanted.

Task. Recovering their data, across whatever media they walked in with, was the job.

Action. Data recovery ran across pretty much every common storage type — SD cards, spinning HDDs, SSDs, RAID arrays, external drives, Mac systems. Each of those fails and gives up its data differently: an SSD is a different problem from a platter drive, a RAID array is a different problem again, and a Mac filesystem has its own quirks. So the work was as much about knowing the right approach for the specific medium as it was about any single technique.

Result. Clients got critical data back from devices they’d already written off as gone, across every common kind of storage. There’s a specific relief on someone’s face when you hand back the drive with their files intact — that was the point of the work, and it happened across the whole range of media.

Task. Diagnosing and fixing them reliably was the job — reliably being the operative word, because a laptop repair that doesn’t hold is just a delayed second visit.

Action. The hardware was repaired end to end — screens, hinges, keyboards, trackpads, motherboards, power — which at the motherboard level is genuinely fiddly, close work, and the software problems resolved across all three operating systems. The diagnosis is usually the real skill: a laptop that won’t power on could be the charger, the board, or the battery, and the repair is only as good as the guess about what’s actually broken. So the care went into finding the real fault before touching anything.

Result. Machines went back to their owners working and dependable, hardware and software both sorted. A repair that holds up is the only kind worth doing, and getting the diagnosis right first is what made these hold.

The four problems

• The Backpack link was malformed. The only documented format is https://backpack.app/ul/v1/browse/<url>?ref=<ref> — a universal link with the target URL in the path and a required ref. A custom-scheme guess like backpack://ul/v1/browse?url=... matches no route the app registers, so the user ends on the wallet’s install page.
• Solflare needs its universal link too: https://solflare.com/ul/v1/browse/<url>?ref=<ref>, not the bare solflare:// scheme. A bare scheme can launch the app without routing it — which is exactly “the app opens, but the site tab has to be opened by hand”.
• Both parameters must be encoded. url is the full absolute dApp address and ref is the requesting origin, each passed through encodeURIComponent. An unencoded ? or & in the target corrupts the parse, and the wallet opens on its home screen instead of the browser tab.
• The trigger matters as much as the link. Universal links only switch apps on a navigation the operating system trusts — and they deliberately do nothing when pasted into the address bar, which is also how a perfectly correct link “fails” during testing.

The documented formats

• Phantom: https://phantom.app/ul/browse/<url>?ref=<ref> — no /v1 in this one.
• Solflare: https://solflare.com/ul/v1/browse/<url>?ref=<ref>
• Backpack: https://backpack.app/ul/v1/browse/<url>?ref=<ref>

One pattern serves all three:

const WALLET_BROWSE = {
  phantom: (url, ref) =>
    `https://phantom.app/ul/browse/${url}?ref=${ref}`,
  solflare: (url, ref) =>
    `https://solflare.com/ul/v1/browse/${url}?ref=${ref}`,
  backpack: (url, ref) =>
    `https://backpack.app/ul/v1/browse/${url}?ref=${ref}`,
};

function walletBrowseLink(
  walletName,
  targetUrl = window.location.href,
) {
  const build = WALLET_BROWSE[walletName.toLowerCase()];
  if (!build) return null;
  return build(
    encodeURIComponent(targetUrl),
    encodeURIComponent(window.location.origin),
  );
}

Triggering the link so iOS and Android accept it

• Render a real anchor, precomputed. A plain <a href={walletBrowseLink('phantom')}> is the most reliable trigger on both platforms.
• If it must be programmatic, assign window.location.href synchronously inside the tap handler — no await, no fetch, no setTimeout first. After asynchronous work the gesture context is gone, and iOS falls back to the wallet’s website. Never window.open.
• Never test by pasting into the address bar. Universal links deliberately do not fire there; test with a tapped link or a QR code scanned by the camera.
• Mind the messenger webviews. Opened inside Telegram’s or Instagram’s in-app browser, universal links are frequently swallowed and the wallet’s plain website loads instead. User-agent detection is heuristic at best, so also give users a visible escape hatch: “open in Safari or Chrome, then connect”.

The bigger fix on Android

Hand-rolled deep links are the iOS story. On Android, Solana Mobile’s Mobile Wallet Adapter lets a dApp running in the mobile browser connect straight to the installed wallet app, with no in-app-browser detour at all. Recent versions of @solana/wallet-adapter-react register the mobile adapter automatically, so upgrading the wallet-adapter packages can fix Android by itself. The target architecture: Mobile Wallet Adapter on Android, browse universal links on iOS, where Apple allows no equivalent.

Verifying on a device

1. Real device, wallet installed, link opened from the system browser — not from a messenger.
2. Tap a rendered link or scan a QR code; never paste into the address bar.
3. Confirm the wallet opens and the dApp loads in its in-app browser tab — the second half is the part that fails.
4. Repeat without the wallet installed: the universal link should degrade to the wallet’s website. That page appearing while the app is installed means the link or the trigger is still wrong.
5. Then test the messenger path, and add the “open in browser” hint if it fails there.

Sources

• Phantom: deep links on iOS and Android
• Solflare: the Browse deep link
• Backpack: the Browse deep link
• Solana Mobile: Mobile Wallet Adapter