Notes from the build.
Engineering deep dives, architecture decisions and what we learned shipping operations-heavy software.
Time Zones Will Find You
Your scheduled report skips one Sunday in March and runs twice in October. A short guide to storing instants, naming zones, and testing the dates that break time handling.
AI in Medical Imaging: What Is Proven and What Is Not
Cleared imaging tools exist, but strong paper results often weaken in real hospitals. How to judge claims, what to ask vendors, and how to introduce AI into a reading workflow carefully.
Onboarding Is a Saga, Not a Form
Provisioning a customer touches five systems and can fail in the middle of any of them. Treating it as a durable transaction is the difference between a stalled signup and a support ticket.
The Hidden Cost of Microservices for Small Teams
A six person team does not have the coordination problem microservices solve, but it pays every cost. Why we usually recommend a modular monolith, and when splitting does make sense.
Where Large Language Models Earn Their Keep in Operations
Language models are strong at reading messy text and weak at exact decisions. We map where they pay off in operations, where they disappoint, and how to design for their mistakes.
What We Refused to Automate
The value in treasury automation was never the model. It was getting the exclusion rules and column mappings out of one person's head and into an artefact.
Offline First Clinical Software for Unreliable Networks
When the connection drops at the bedside, software should keep working. We cover local storage, conflict rules, duplicate patients and sync design for clinics with unreliable networks.
Reading Postgres EXPLAIN Without Fear
Query plans look hostile until you know a handful of terms. A practical guide to reading EXPLAIN output, spotting bad estimates and fixing slow queries without guessing.
Why We Write the Runbook Before the Code
Writing the page an exhausted engineer will need at night, before building the feature, exposes missing alerts, unsafe reruns and absent kill switches while they are still cheap to fix.
Six Platforms, Small Team
AI leverage in a studio does not show up as typing faster. It shows up as holding architectural context across a build large enough that a small team would previously have lost the thread.
Digital Public Infrastructure: Lessons From India's Stack
India's identity, payments and consent layers are best understood as shared protocols, not apps. We look at what the design teaches, what does not transfer, and what builders should take from it.
What a Good Audit Log Actually Records
A finance lead asks who approved a payment, and the log says only that something was updated. Here is what an audit trail needs to record so it answers real questions under pressure.
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