89 posts
Engineering
Articles and guides about Engineering.
5 Software Architecture Mistakes That Kill Startups
The architecture decisions that silently doom startups, and how to make the right calls early. Real lessons from real projects.
The Modern Startup Tech Stack: Next.js, TypeScript, Supabase, and Why We Chose Boring
The startup tech stack we actually use in production, and why every piece was chosen for reliability over hype. An opinionated guide from real projects.
Real Time Architecture: WebSockets, SSE, and Polling Compared
A technical deep dive into real time architecture patterns, polling, SSE, and WebSockets compared with production examples, trade offs, and a decision framework.
Technical Debt: How to Measure It and When to Fix It
A practical guide to technical debt, what it actually is, how to measure its impact, when to fix it vs live with it, and how to communicate it to non technical stakeholders.
Shopping Cart Architecture for Custom Ecommerce
How to architect a shopping cart for custom ecommerce. Covers data models, session management, pricing engines, and checkout flow design.
How to Handle Refunds and Disputes in Your App
Learn how to build refund and dispute handling into your app the right way. Covers chargebacks, automated workflows, and protecting your revenue.
Building a Review and Rating System That Users Trust
How to design and build a review and rating system that earns user trust, prevents manipulation, and drives real purchasing decisions on your platform.
Testing Payment Flows: Stripe, Webhooks, and Edge Cases
Payment flows have more edge cases than any other feature. Learn how to test Stripe integrations, webhook handlers, and the failure scenarios most teams miss.
Building Approval Workflows: From Email Chains to Software
How to replace slow, error prone email approval chains with structured software workflows. Faster approvals, full audit trails, zero lost requests.
How to Handle Database Migrations Without Downtime
Learn how to run database migrations without downtime using expand and contract patterns, backward compatible changes, and zero downtime deployment strategies.
OAuth and Social Login Implementation: The Complete Guide
Implement OAuth and social login correctly. Learn the security pitfalls, provider differences, and architecture decisions that make authentication reliable at scale.
Zero Downtime Deployments: How to Ship Without Downtime
A practical guide to zero downtime deployments for web applications. Covers blue green, rolling, and canary strategies with real implementation details.
Secrets Management: Keeping API Keys and Credentials Safe
A practical guide to secrets management for engineering teams. Covers common mistakes like hardcoded credentials, environment variables vs secret managers, rotation strategies, and CI/CD pipeline secrets.
How to Handle Data Deletion Requests Without Breaking Your App
A practical guide to implementing user data deletion that satisfies GDPR and CCPA requirements without corrupting your database or breaking dependent systems.
Adding Two Factor Authentication to Your Product
A practical guide to implementing two factor authentication in your web or mobile app. Covers TOTP, SMS, passkeys, and the UX tradeoffs that actually matter.
Background Jobs and Queue Architecture: A Practical Guide
Learn how to design background job systems and message queues that handle email, payments, data processing, and more without slowing down your application.
API Security Beyond Authentication: Rate Limiting, Validation, and Encryption
A deep dive into API security beyond authentication. Covers rate limiting, input validation, encryption, OWASP API risks, and production hardening techniques.
Multi Currency and International Ecommerce
How to architect an ecommerce system for multiple currencies, localized pricing, tax compliance, and international payments. Lessons from projects handling cross border transactions.
SaaS Data Export and Portability: What to Build and Why It Matters
Data export is not just a compliance checkbox. Learn how to build robust data portability features that reduce churn, build trust, and meet regulatory requirements.
Feature Flags: How to Ship Fast Without Breaking Production
Feature flags let you deploy code without releasing it to users. Learn how to architect a feature flag system that enables fast shipping, safe rollbacks, and controlled rollouts.
Headless Commerce Architecture: When and How to Make the Switch
Headless commerce decouples your storefront from your backend. Learn when this architecture makes sense, how to implement it, and what it costs compared to traditional platforms.
File Upload Architecture: From Browser to Storage
How to build a file upload system that handles large files, multiple formats, and high concurrency. Covers signed URLs, chunked uploads, processing pipelines, and storage architecture.
Order Management System Architecture
A practical guide to order management system architecture covering order lifecycles, state machines, inventory sync, fulfillment routing, and the patterns that hold up at scale.
Penetration Testing Your Own Application
A practical guide to penetration testing your application. What to test, how to scope it, which tools to use, and how to act on the results without breaking production.
Webhook Architecture: How to Build Reliable Integrations
Webhooks seem simple until they fail silently. Learn how to architect reliable webhook delivery with retries, idempotency, and observability built in from the start.
Search Architecture: When PostgreSQL Is Not Enough
PostgreSQL full text search works until it does not. Learn when your product needs dedicated search infrastructure and how to architect it without overengineering.
Multi Product SaaS Architecture: How to Build a Platform That Scales
Learn how to architect a multi product SaaS platform with shared infrastructure, isolated data, and clean boundaries between products. Real patterns from production systems.
Event Driven Architecture: When It Is Worth the Complexity
Event driven architecture enables powerful decoupling and scalability but adds real complexity. A practical guide to deciding when the tradeoffs are justified.
Microservices vs Monolith: The Right Choice for Your Stage
Microservices or monolith? The answer depends on your team size, stage, and growth trajectory. A practical architecture decision guide from real project experience.
Dynamic Pricing Engine: Architecture and Considerations
How to architect a dynamic pricing engine that handles rules, tiers, promotions, and real time adjustments. Practical patterns from ecommerce and SaaS projects we have built.
The Myth of the 10x Developer: Why Process Beats Talent
The 10x developer is a myth that leads to bad hiring and worse architecture. Learn why engineering process and system design matter more than individual talent.
The Problem with Move Fast and Break Things
Move fast and break things was never good advice for most companies. Here is why speed without discipline leads to expensive failures, and what to do instead.
Calendar Integration and Scheduling Architecture
Building scheduling features means handling time zones, calendar syncing, and conflict detection. Learn the architecture behind reliable calendar integrations.
What Is an API and Why Your Business Needs One
APIs are the connective tissue of modern software. Learn what an API is, how it works, why your business likely needs one, and what good API design looks like.
The Best Code Is Code You Do Not Write
Every line of code is a liability. The best engineering teams ship more by writing less. Here is how we think about what to build, what to buy, and what to skip entirely.
Why We Stopped Recommending Microservices for Startups
We used to recommend microservices for greenfield projects. We stopped. Here is what changed our mind and what we recommend instead.
Every Feature You Add Makes Your Product Harder to Change
Feature creep is the silent killer of software products. Every addition increases surface area, maintenance burden, and resistance to change. Here is why the best products are defined by what they leave out.
Notification System Architecture: Email, Push, and In App
How to architect a notification system that handles email, push, and in app channels without becoming a tangled mess. Covers routing, preferences, templates, and delivery guarantees.
Performance Optimization When Customers Start Complaining
A practical guide to diagnosing and fixing performance issues when customers report slowness, covering database tuning, caching, frontend optimization, and more.
Building a Developer API: Turning Your Product into a Platform
How to design and build a developer API that turns your product into a platform, covering authentication, documentation, rate limiting, and developer experience.
From Single Tenant to Multi Tenant: A Migration Path
A step by step migration path from single tenant to multi tenant architecture, covering database strategies, tenant isolation, and avoiding costly pitfalls.
Building Activity Feeds and Social Features Into Your Product
Activity feeds, notifications, and social features are deceptively complex. Learn the architecture patterns, data models, and real time delivery systems behind them.
What QA Actually Means and Why You Cannot Skip It
QA is more than clicking through your app before launch. Learn what quality assurance actually involves, why skipping it costs more than doing it, and how to build it into your process.
A/B Testing Architecture: Running Experiments in Production
A/B testing is more than swapping button colors. Learn the architecture behind running reliable experiments in production without breaking your app or misleading your team.
Building a SaaS API for Third Party Integrations
Learn how to design, build, and maintain a public API for your SaaS product that developers actually want to integrate with.
How AI Is Changing the Software Development Process
AI is reshaping how software gets built, from automated code review to intelligent testing. Here is what is changing, what is not, and how to take advantage of it.
SaaS Email Infrastructure: Transactional vs Marketing vs Lifecycle
Understand the three types of SaaS email, transactional, marketing, and lifecycle, and how to architect reliable email infrastructure that scales.
Computer Vision for Business: Practical Applications and Real Costs
A practical guide to computer vision in business, covering real applications, architecture patterns, accuracy benchmarks, and what it actually costs to build.
AI Coding Tools: What They Can and Cannot Do for Your Project
AI coding tools like Copilot and Claude are changing development. Here is an honest breakdown of what they do well, where they fail, and what it means for your software project.
Building Software for Regulated Industries
How to build software for regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and insurance. Covers compliance, security, audit trails, and the architecture decisions that matter.
AI Content Moderation: Automating Trust and Safety
How AI content moderation works, what it catches, what it misses, and how to build a moderation system that scales. Practical guide for platform builders.
Building a Recommendation Engine: How It Works and What It Costs
Learn how recommendation engines work, what it takes to build one, and realistic cost ranges. From collaborative filtering to AI powered personalization.
Building an Affiliate System for Your Product
A practical guide to building an affiliate system for your SaaS or digital product. Covers tracking architecture, commission models, payout workflows, and fraud prevention.
Fine Tuning vs RAG: Which AI Approach for Your Product
A technical comparison of fine tuning and retrieval augmented generation for production AI products. When to use each, the real costs, and how to decide.
Real Time Chat Architecture: How to Build It Right
Building real time chat is harder than it looks. Learn about WebSocket architecture, message ordering, presence systems, and how to scale to millions of concurrent users.
Moving from Zapier and Make to Custom Integrations: When No Code Hits the Wall
When Zapier and Make automation tools stop scaling, custom integrations take over. Learn when to migrate, what it costs, and how to build integrations that actually scale.
How to Build a Fleet Management Platform
Learn how to build a custom fleet management platform with GPS tracking, route optimization, and maintenance scheduling that scales with your operation.
Migrating Native Apps to React Native: When It Makes Sense and How to Do It
A practical guide to migrating native iOS and Android apps to React Native. Covers cost savings, code sharing, performance trade offs, and the migration process.
Design Systems for Product Teams: Build Once, Ship Faster Forever
A design system is the highest leverage investment a product team can make. Learn how to build one that actually gets adopted, what to include, and what to skip.
AI Will Not Replace Developers but It Will Change What They Build
AI is not replacing software developers. It is changing what they focus on. Learn how AI reshapes development workflows and why human engineers remain essential.
Why We Choose Next.js for Almost Everything
Next.js is our default framework for web applications. Here is why we chose it over alternatives, where it excels, and the rare cases where we reach for something else.
Workflow Engine Architecture: Building Configurable Business Logic
How to architect a workflow engine that lets teams configure business logic without code changes. Covers state machines, rule engines, async execution, and real world patterns.
PDF Generation and Document Automation for Business Apps
How to build PDF generation and document automation into business applications. Comparing libraries, handling templates, and automating invoices, reports, and contracts.
Audit Logging: Building a Complete Activity Trail
How to build production grade audit logging that tracks every user and system action. Covers schema design, write performance, querying, retention, and compliance.
Offline First Architecture: Building Apps That Work Without Internet
How to build offline first applications. Local storage strategies, sync protocols, conflict resolution, and practical patterns for apps that work without internet.
The Fastest Way to Kill a Product Is to Redesign Everything at Once
Full product redesigns fail more often than they succeed. Learn why incremental improvements beat big bang rewrites and how to modernize without destroying what works.
Geolocation and Maps: Building Location Based Features
A practical guide to building location based features with geolocation APIs, mapping libraries, and spatial databases. Covers geocoding, geofencing, and real time tracking.
Third Party API Integration: Building Connections That Do Not Break
How to build resilient third party API integrations. Retry logic, circuit breakers, webhook handling, and testing strategies for production reliability.
How to Add Real Time Collaboration to Your Product
A practical guide to building real time collaboration features including presence, live cursors, and concurrent editing. Covers architecture patterns and technology choices.
Database Indexing Strategy: What to Index and When
Database indexes can make or break your application performance. Learn PostgreSQL indexing fundamentals, when to add indexes, when to avoid them, and how to identify missing indexes in production.
When to Kill a Feature: Knowing What to Remove
Removing features is harder than adding them. Learn the signals that tell you when a feature is hurting your product and how to remove it without alienating users.
GraphQL in Production: When It Helps and When It Hurts
A practical guide to running GraphQL in production. When GraphQL saves development time, when REST is the better choice, and how to avoid common pitfalls.
Data Migration Planning: Moving Data Without Losing It
A practical guide to data migration planning covering strategy, validation, rollback plans, and how to move data between systems without losing records or breaking production.
How Much Does API Development Cost in 2025
A detailed breakdown of API development costs. Covers REST and GraphQL APIs, authentication, documentation, rate limiting, and what drives the price from $10,000 to $300,000.
User Generated Content at Scale: Architecture and Moderation
Learn how to architect user generated content systems that scale to millions of submissions while keeping moderation fast, accurate, and affordable.
Your Tech Stack Is Five Years Old: Modernize or Rebuild
Your tech stack is aging and slowing you down. Here is how to decide whether to modernize incrementally or rebuild from scratch, with real cost and timeline estimates.
Your Technical Co Founder Left: What Happens to the Code
Your technical co founder just left. Here is how to protect your codebase, keep development moving, and avoid the mistakes that sink startups after a technical departure.
WCAG Accessibility Compliance for Web Applications
A practical guide to WCAG accessibility compliance for web applications covering AA standards, common failures, testing tools, and how to build accessible apps from day one.
Why Your Software Team Keeps Missing Deadlines
Your software team misses every deadline. Here is why it keeps happening and the specific process changes that actually fix the problem.
Your App Keeps Crashing in Production: A Founder's Stabilization Guide
Your app is crashing in production and you are losing users. Here is a step by step stabilization guide covering triage, root causes, and long term fixes.
How to Build Software for Government Contracts
Learn how to build software that meets government contract requirements, from FedRAMP and Section 508 compliance to procurement timelines and security standards.
Your Previous Agency Shipped Bad Code: Now What
Your last agency delivered a mess. Here is how to evaluate the damage, decide what is worth saving, and avoid making the same mistake with the next team.
Database Schema Design That Does Not Haunt You Later
Bad schema design compounds into every feature you build. Learn the database architecture decisions that keep your product fast, flexible, and maintainable as you scale.
Why We Choose Boring Technology and You Should Too
Boring technology ships faster, breaks less, and costs less to maintain. Here is why we bet on proven tools over trendy ones, and why your startup should do the same.
Stop Overengineering Your MVP
Your MVP does not need microservices, Kubernetes, or a custom design system. It needs to exist. Here is why overengineering kills more startups than bad code.
How to Build an Inventory Management System
A practical guide to building a custom inventory management system with real time tracking, warehouse operations, and demand forecasting that scales.
Replacing Legacy Enterprise Software: A Migration Playbook
A step by step playbook for replacing outdated enterprise systems with modern software, including data migration, parallel running, and risk management.
Migrating a Monolith to Modern Architecture Without Stopping Development
A practical guide to breaking apart monolithic systems into modern architecture while keeping your product live and your team shipping features.
Inherited a Bad Codebase: How to Assess What You Actually Have
You just inherited a codebase and it looks rough. Here is a systematic approach to assess the damage, prioritize fixes, and decide whether to refactor or rebuild.