Two new essays per day, written by our team in collaboration with Claude. Original work only. Filter by category to dial in.
Shopify's abandoned checkout webhook is noisy, late, and bad at attribution. Here's the event pipeline we build instead so recovery emails, SMS, and WhatsApp don't double-count or miss revenue.
Edge middleware promised sub-50ms execution. Our p95 said otherwise. Here's what we found when we instrumented it properly, and the three changes that brought latency back under control.
React Native apps quietly balloon past 100MB and tank install rates. Here's how we audit bundle size, hunt down the real culprits, and ship a leaner binary without rewriting in Swift.
Modals look simple in Figma and break in twelve different ways in production. Here's the focus trap, scroll lock, and ESC handling we actually ship — and why the native <dialog> element finally earns its keep in 2026.
Long-context models tempt you to stuff everything into the prompt. That's how you end up with slow, expensive, and weirdly dumb responses. Here's how we budget tokens in production.
Every founder eventually gets the pitch: 'We're cash-light but the upside is huge — would you take equity?' Here's the framework we use to decide, and the deal structures that actually pay out.
E-commerceShopify Markets looks like the obvious answer for selling abroad — until tax, content, and payment realities hit. Here's how we decide between Markets, multiple stores, or a hybrid for cross-border brands.
DevOps & CloudA DynamoDB throttle event left our Terraform state half-written and locked. Here's the postmortem, the recovery steps, and the guardrails we added so it doesn't happen again.
Web Developmentnext/font is great until it isn't. A practical breakdown of when to use it, when to ship raw @font-face, and how to stop fonts from wrecking your LCP and CLS scores.
Mobile DevelopmentUniversal Links and Android App Links still break in production more than they should. Here's a field guide for getting them right in Expo Router apps without surprising the App Review team.
Design & UXMost design token systems look great in Figma and fall apart in the codebase. Here's how to structure tokens so they actually hold up across Tailwind, iOS, and three product teams.
AI & LLMsPrompt caching looks like free money: stuff a giant system prompt once, pay pennies forever. The reality is messier. Here's when it actually saves you cost and latency, and when it quietly costs more than it saves.
Startups & BusinessFree scoping is where agencies lose margin and clients lose patience. Here's how we restructured discovery into a paid, two-week sprint that de-risks the build and closes more deals.
SEO & GrowthBulk-updating dateModified on a million pages is a great way to get ignored — or worse. Here's how we decide which programmatic pages deserve a real refresh, and how to wire the signal cleanly.
E-commerceNative Shopify search works until it doesn't. Here's how to spot the breaking point, pick a replacement (Algolia, Typesense, Meilisearch, or Shopify's own Search & Discovery), and wire it in without nuking your theme.
DevOps & CloudA single NAT Gateway line item quietly ate our cloud budget. Here's the traffic audit, the VPC endpoint rollout, and the gotchas nobody mentions in the AWS docs.
Web DevelopmentCross-document view transitions finally landed in stable browsers and Next.js shipped a primitive for them. Here's what actually works in production, what still tears, and how to keep CLS honest.
Mobile DevelopmentHow we pushed a React Native + Expo app from 99.2% to 99.9% crash-free sessions — what actually mattered, what was noise, and where Sentry, Hermes, and EAS fit in.
AI & LLMsJSON mode, strict schemas, and tool calls all promise reliable structured output from LLMs. They behave differently under load, failure, and schema drift. Here's how we pick between them.
Startups & BusinessMost agency-to-product transitions die because the product team never gets its own oxygen. Here's the operational playbook we use to spin a product unit out of a services business without breaking either one.
SEO & GrowthFacets are where programmatic SEO sites quietly bleed crawl budget and rank signals. Here's the rule set we use to decide which combinations earn a URL, which get noindex, and which never see a link.
E-commerceOverselling on peak days is rarely a Shopify bug. It's a sync architecture problem. Here's how we redesigned a multi-channel inventory pipeline to stop the bleed without rewriting the ERP.
DevOps & CloudWe ran the same Next.js API workload on Cloud Run and Lambda for three months. Cold starts, cost, observability, and one nasty timeout bug shaped the decision.
Web DevelopmentNext.js middleware looks like the perfect place for auth. Then your bundle balloons, your Edge runtime chokes on a Node API, and your login redirects loop. Here's how we untangled it.
Mobile DevelopmentBackground execution on iOS and Android is a minefield of OEM quirks, OS budgets, and silent task kills. Here's what survives in production React Native and Expo apps in 2026 — and what to stop trying.
Design & UXMost empty states show a sad cloud and a 'No data yet' label. That's a dead pixel. Here's how to turn the zero state into the most persuasive screen in your product.
AI & LLMsRerankers fix the recall-precision gap in RAG, but they cost latency and money. Here's when a cross-encoder actually pays off, and when you should tune retrieval instead.
Startups & BusinessSome of the most dangerous revenue in an agency is the kind that still prints money. Here's how we decide when to kill a profitable service line before it kills our roadmap.
SEO & GrowthMost programmatic SEO teams track impressions and revenue in separate silos. Here's how we stitch GA4 and GSC together in BigQuery to get a real query-to-revenue view that actually drives roadmap decisions.
E-commerceMost Shopify themes still reload the PDP when a customer picks a size. Here's the pattern we use to swap variants in under 150ms without breaking SEO, analytics, or the cart.
DevOps & CloudA scheduled job that hadn't fired in six hours, no alert, no error in Sentry, and a billing email that didn't get sent. Here's exactly what broke, how we caught it, and the cron monitoring pattern we run now.
Web DevelopmentA war story about how `revalidateTag` and a disciplined tagging scheme replaced our nightly full-cache purge — and the four gotchas we hit getting there in production.
Mobile DevelopmentFace ID and fingerprint look simple from the product side. The keychain semantics, passkey fallbacks, and review-time edge cases are where React Native teams lose a week. Here's what we've learned shipping it.
Design & UXSkeleton screens aren't automatically better than spinners. Here's the decision tree we use on real projects, with code, timing thresholds, and the accessibility traps nobody talks about.
AI & LLMsStreaming tool calls feel like a free win until your agent state diverges, your UI flickers, and your retries double-charge users. Here's how to ship it without the footguns.
Startups & BusinessWhiteboard interviews keep failing us on senior hires. Here's the paid trial project we run instead — what it costs, what it measures, and the failure modes to watch.
SEO & GrowthThe Search Console UI tops out at 1,000 rows and 16 months. If you run programmatic SEO, that's not enough. Here's how we wire GSC's BigQuery export into a query workflow that actually drives decisions.
E-commerceWe replaced a third of a Shopify store's checkout volume with a WhatsApp-driven flow. Here's the architecture, the conversion math, and the parts we'd build differently next time.
DevOps & CloudA war story about Sentry transactions, span ingestion, and a 6x bill spike — plus the dynamic sampling, SDK config, and quota guardrails we now ship by default.
Web DevelopmentStreaming SSR is free performance — until it isn't. Where you place Suspense boundaries decides whether your page feels fast or stutters its way through a waterfall of spinners.
Mobile DevelopmentPush delivery looks fine in your dashboard but users swear they never got the notification. Here's what actually breaks push on iOS and Android in 2026, and how to debug it before support tickets pile up.
Design & UXRemoving the focus ring is the most common accessibility regression we see in audits. Here's how to keep keyboard users happy without making your designer cry.
AI & LLMsPicking one frontier model and praying is not a strategy. Here's how we route requests across Claude, GPT, and Gemini in production — by task shape, cost, and failure mode.
Startups & BusinessMost agencies lose money not on the original scope but on the drip of 'small' changes. Here's the protocol we use to keep change requests from quietly killing a project.
E-commerceWe've shipped both Hydrogen storefronts and heavily customized Liquid themes for stores doing $5M–$50M GMV. Here's where headless actually pays for itself, and where it quietly bleeds money for two years before anyone admits it.
DevOps & CloudWe moved part of a production AWS estate from Terraform to Pulumi over six months. Here's what actually changed, what broke, and where we'd quietly stay on HCL.
Web DevelopmentServer Components feel magical until you try to pass a Date, a class instance, or a function through the boundary. Here's how to design around the serialization wall instead of fighting it.
Mobile DevelopmentOTA updates are the best superpower Expo gives you — and the easiest way to get your app pulled. Here's how we structure EAS Update channels, staged rollouts, and rollbacks without tripping Apple's review rules.
Design & UXToasts feel modern, but they're quietly failing the people who need them most. Here's how we audit, fix, or replace them — with patterns that hold up under accessibility and conversion scrutiny.
AI & LLMsSemantic caching promises huge cost wins for LLM apps, but naive implementations leak wrong answers across users. Here's how we build cache layers that actually hold up.
Startups & BusinessMost agency pricing debates are religious wars. After enough botched estimates and uncomfortable invoice conversations, we settled on a three-way framework — and a rule for when to use each.
SEO & GrowthGSC tells you what Google indexed. Logs tell you what Googlebot actually did. Here's how we use raw server logs to find crawl waste on programmatic sites and fix it before it costs traffic.
E-commerceEveryone wants a one-page checkout. Almost nobody needs one. Here's what we've seen actually move mobile conversion after rebuilding checkouts for stores doing $2M to $40M a year.
DevOps & CloudWe rolled out OpenTelemetry across a Node and Go fleet, picked tail-based sampling because everyone said to, and learned why head-based wins for most teams. Here's the tradeoff we wish someone had drawn for us.
Web DevelopmentPartial Prerendering looked like free performance on the demo slide. Then we shipped it. Here's what actually breaks when you flip the flag on a real Next.js app — and how we'd roll it out now.
Mobile DevelopmentA practical breakdown of the IAP rejection patterns we keep seeing in React Native and Expo apps in 2026 — from receipt validation to subscription restore flows — with code you can lift straight into your project.
Design & UXGreyed-out buttons feel safe to designers and ship-ready to engineers. They're neither. Here's why disabled states quietly tank conversion, and the patterns we use to replace them without breaking validation.
AI & LLMsMost LLM eval setups measure the wrong things and miss the regressions that actually break production. Here's how we build harnesses that catch silent failures before users do.
Startups & BusinessFree proposals burn senior time and reward tire-kickers. Here's how we restructured the top of our agency funnel around a paid two-week pilot, what we charge, and how it changed close rates and client quality.
SEO & GrowthOne giant sitemap.xml is the silent bottleneck on most programmatic SEO sites. Here's how we shard sitemaps so Google crawls the pages that actually matter — and recrawls them when they change.
