Switching your ecommerce platform is one of the most consequential engineering decisions a team can make. Done well, it unlocks better performance, cleaner architecture, and a foundation that scales with the business. Done poorly, it causes data loss, broken customer journeys, SEO rank drops, and sometimes weeks of downtime that cost far more than the […]
Read more
The headless commerce conversation has shifted. Teams are no longer asking whether to go headless. They are asking which stack actually holds up once the traffic climbs, the product catalog grows, and the business requirements get complicated. Two stacks consistently come up in engineering discussions: Medusa.js and Shopify Hydrogen. Both position themselves as developer-first frameworks […]
Read more
ArgoCD became the default answer when someone said “GitOps” for a good few years. It solved the most common problem neatly: sync your Kubernetes cluster state to what is defined in a Git repository. For teams running a handful of clusters with manageable application counts, ArgoCD works extremely well. The friction begins when the organisation […]
Read more
Prototypes lie. They perform well in demos because they are not doing any of the work that production systems actually do. There is no real traffic generating concurrent load. There is no error handling for the inputs that real users will inevitably send. There is no logging that needs to be queried at 2 AM […]
Read more
There is a measurement problem at the heart of platform engineering. The people who benefit most from a well-built internal developer platform are often the least aware of its existence. When a developer spins up a new service in fifteen minutes using a scaffold template, runs tests in a consistent CI pipeline, deploys to a […]
Read more
Search is one of those features that seems straightforward until you try to build it properly. A basic LIKE query handles small datasets. The moment your corpus grows, your users start expecting typo tolerance, faceted filtering, relevance ranking, and sub-100-millisecond response times, that LIKE query stops being an answer. Every application that stores content, products, […]
Read more
There is a gap inside most engineering organisations that rarely shows up in a sprint retrospective but shows up very clearly in quarterly cloud bills. Developers make dozens of technical decisions every week that carry real cost implications: which database tier to provision, how frequently a background job polls an external API, whether logs are […]
Read more
Most applications that describe themselves as encrypted are not end-to-end encrypted. They encrypt data in transit using TLS and encrypt data at rest using a storage-layer key managed by the cloud provider. Both are important and neither is E2EE. In a genuine end-to-end encrypted system, the server processes ciphertext it cannot decrypt. Only the communicating […]
Read more
Every backend team eventually ships a change that breaks a client they forgot about. It usually happens the same way. The API contract looked stable. The change felt minor. The release went out on a Tuesday afternoon, and by Wednesday morning the support queue was full of integration partners reporting 500 errors and mobile app […]
Read more
Connection pooling sits in a quiet corner of most backend architectures. It rarely appears in architecture diagrams, it generates no alerts until something goes badly wrong, and most engineers configure it once and never revisit it. That neglect is expensive. A misconfigured connection pool is one of the most common causes of database-related outages in […]
Read more