Articles
Notes from inside the build.
What we learned shipping the last few projects, written up while we still remember why the code looks like that.
SYSTEM.LOG // INSIGHTS FROM THE BUILD // UPDATED CONTINUOUSLY
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The agent is not the product
The useful work is not making an agent act. It is deciding what it may do, when a person must approve it, and how failure is recovered.
4 min read
Trace the journey, not the service
Healthy services can still produce a broken checkout. Observability becomes useful when it follows the user's outcome across every boundary.
4 min read
Performance budgets belong in planning
Performance cannot be polished in at the end. A useful budget turns speed into a constraint the whole team can trade against.
4 min read
Offline is a product state
A lost connection is not an exceptional case on mobile. Designing it as a real state makes the app calmer, safer and easier to trust.
4 min read
A design system is a delivery system
Components are only the visible layer. The real system is the path that turns repeated product decisions into reliable delivery.
4 min read
Feature flags need an exit plan
Flags make releases safer, but temporary control paths become permanent complexity unless removal is part of the original work.
4 min read
Retrieval is a product decision
A model cannot rescue the wrong evidence. Reliable retrieval starts with content ownership, useful boundaries and honest failure behaviour.
4 min read
The vertical slice is the real architecture
Architecture becomes real when one user outcome crosses the interface, services, data and deployment path—not when every layer has a diagram.
4 min read
Push notifications are a distributed system
Accepted is not delivered, and delivered is not useful. Reliable notifications require product thinking across a long, lossy chain.
4 min read
Idempotency is a product feature
Retries are inevitable. Idempotency protects users from turning one uncertain action into two payments, orders or messages.
4 min readShipping LLM features without shipping nonsense
Evals, guardrails and the boring plumbing that decides whether an AI feature survives contact with users.
2 min readExpo in production, two years on
What holds up, what still needs native code, and how OTA updates change the way a small team releases.
2 min readThe migration nobody noticed
Moving a high-traffic journey onto a new stack without a launch date, a freeze, or a drop in conversion.
2 min readRunbooks beat heroics
What we hand over so the team that inherits a system can run it at 3am without calling us.
2 min readExplore the index
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Useful thinking. Applied to your product.
Senior design and engineering across mobile, web, AI and the backend behind them.