Essays on the work we actually do — AI product development, codebase audits, design engineering, and the operating model behind a small senior team. Written by the people who ship.
The browser's WebSocket API won't let you send an auth header. Three patterns emerged to work around it — first-message, subprotocol hack, and the ticket exchange. Here's why Slack, Discord, and AWS all reach for the ticket.
Google's SRE team published a long paper on running AI agents in production. Skim the first few pages. The middle is where the experience is. Here's the part worth keeping.
Frontend carries more debt than backend — for cultural, historical, and structural reasons. AI changes the refactor math, but only with three guardrails: Zod at every boundary, ironclad TypeScript, and tests that ship with the code.
Studios, agencies, and consultancies all build software for hire — but the operating model behind them is different in ways that matter for outcomes.
A decision framework — five questions that separate codebases worth saving from ones better replaced. With heuristics from eight inherited projects.
The last 20% of polish that nobody else will touch. Why design engineers exist, what they do, and how the role fits between product, design, and frontend.