Blog
Field notes on building products: architecture, AI as a tool, mobile, and everything that keeps a product standing.
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Applied AI2
- Queues and priorities: orchestrating thousands of documents with TemporalA document goes through a dozen steps of OCR, AI and SQL. The real challenge is not chaining them, it is deciding who goes first.7 min
Filetable - A RAG without vectors: the model finds its own booksEvery month, five books picked for each reader. The model invents no title: it queries the catalogue with tools, and code checks everything.6 min
Swelv
Stack & infrastructure3
- Launch fast, then last: SaaS, AI, and the moment to own your stackVercel, Supabase, Trigger.dev and AI let you launch a product in a weekend. But there comes a point where running your own stack costs less, and where you need an engineer in charge.8 minEssays
- Slow queries: from symptom to cause, without guessingMeasuring every query without slowing the app down, recognising three shapes, and four real cases where the culprit was not the one we expected.5 minFiletable
- Deploying in the middle of the day: two versions, one database, open tabsFor a few minutes, the old and the new version run side by side on the same database. And an open tab can stay on the old one for days.6 minFiletable
Web & mobile3
- Flutter and GraphQL: a typed client, and versions that coexistA client generated from the schema, screens that ask for exactly their fields, and a server that keeps talking to the versions already installed.5 minSwelv
- The challenge: editing text in an app, without touching the appTo edit a string right on the page, the Chrome extension has to know which key it comes from. The answer fits in characters that do not render.4 min
Branchlate - Translations that follow Git branchesThe developer syncs their branch, the business fixes copy in the app, CI checks. Nobody waits for anybody, and nobody overwrites anybody's work.4 minBranchlate