Field notes from the build.

Writing about the engineering decisions behind the products we ship — what worked, what didn't, and the tradeoffs nobody talks about. No thought leadership, just lessons we paid to learn.

Featured · AI 10 min read April 2026

Why most AI demos die before production — and what to do about it.

The journey from a working LLM prototype to a system you'd put your name on is longer than most teams expect. Here's the playbook we use to avoid the seven failure modes that kill AI products before launch.

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DESIGN
Mobile 7 min read

The hidden cost of "cross-platform first" decisions.

When React Native is the right call, when Flutter wins, and when going native is the only sane choice. A framework for deciding without religion.

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$ terraform plan + aws_eks_cluster.prod ~ aws_iam_role.app + aws_security_group.web - aws_instance.legacy Plan: 12 add, 3 change, 1 destroy apply
Cloud 9 min read

Cutting an AWS bill by 47% without breaking anything.

The actual audit checklist we run on bloated cloud bills — what to look at, in what order, and which "obvious" fixes will quietly cost you.

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audit
Web3 11 min read

The smart contract bugs auditors keep finding in 2026.

A pattern catalog from recent audit reports: the categories that keep recurring, the tools that catch them, and the ones that still slip through.

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interface User { id: string email: Email role: Role team?: Team } // type-safe by default
Software 6 min read

Why we still write everything in TypeScript.

Five years in. The trade-offs, the tooling tax, the things we'd re-evaluate, and why — for our work — the answer keeps coming out the same.

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UX Research before pixels.
Design 8 min read

How to run user research when nobody on the team is a researcher.

A pragmatic playbook for engineering and product teams who need real user signal — without the budget for a research team or the time for a six-week study.

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v1 v2 v3 v4
Process 5 min read

The case against the two-week sprint.

Why we don't run sprints, what we do instead, and how it makes us ship faster — with less management overhead and fewer status meetings.

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