Writing
Notes on building and shipping products.
20 posts across 7 topics
Practical writing on product engineering, from architecture and infrastructure to hiring, mobile delivery and the decisions that reduce risk.
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Rails Engines as Products: Extract Only After Proof
A Rails engine should be extracted only after its boundary has survived production work. The Responsa case shows what moves out, what stays, and why now.
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AI Automations Worth Building: Most Do Not Need AI
Which AI automations are worth paying for, when a scheduled job or scoring rule is better, and what evals, drift and review really cost in production.
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Design Sprint vs Just Building: Decide Before Code
When structured design work saves a build, when it delays learning, and which product decisions must happen before code can honestly begin in a real product.
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Rails MVP in Weeks: How Hotwire Holds Up in Production
A Rails MVP plan from a production operations workspace: where Hotwire makes server-rendered work fast, and where a frontend state layer earns its cost.
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Technical Due Diligence Checklist Before Buying Software
A technical due diligence checklist for founders and investors who need to prove a codebase, its data, access and recovery story are real before a deal closes.
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Native iOS Push Notifications: Permission and Restraint
How to design native iOS push notifications people keep enabled: ask at the right moment, choose local or remote delivery, and test state on real devices.
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How to Hire an AI Engineer Who Can Verify the Work
How to hire an AI engineer in 2026: interview for evaluation, failure handling, cost and latency discipline, not model names, cheerful demos, or empty claims.
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Freelancer vs Agency vs In-House: Cost, Speed and Risk
A fair comparison of freelancer, agency and in-house hiring costs, delivery speed, bus-factor risk and the practical handover work that makes any choice safer.
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Compound Engineering With Codex: Keeping Agents Honest
How I keep AI-assisted engineering from becoming a pile of plausible diffs: committed instructions, bounded specs, tests, reviews, and records left behind.
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RAG vs Fine-Tuning: Choose the Right System for Work
A practical RAG vs fine-tuning decision guide that covers retrieval quality, retraining costs, and when a prompt with structured extraction is enough.
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Prototype Sprint vs MVP: When a Demo Must Be Deleted
Prototype sprint vs MVP is a decision about what may be faked, what must survive a real user, and when extending a demo becomes wasted spend for good.
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Hosting Is a Trust Problem When Production Is Real
Hosting is a trust problem: how I judge queue isolation, storage migrations, observability and recovery before handing a production system to any host.
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Tests as Contracts for AI Coding Agents in Production
Tests are the specification an AI coding agent can execute. Real import and audio-app examples show how narrow contracts make generated code stay honest.
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OpenAI API Integration Checklist for Production Apps
A production checklist for OpenAI API features: strict response contracts, validation, failure paths, cost limits, versioned prompts and deploy-time evals.
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Fractional CTO vs Full-Time CTO: Hire for the Work
A practical fractional CTO vs full-time CTO guide for founders who need to decide whether the next bottleneck is building, leadership, or coverage in practice.
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MVP Development Cost in 2026: What Actually Drives It
Why MVP quotes vary by 5x, which parts of the build actually consume the budget, and how to write a brief that gets you a real number instead of a guess.
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Passwordless Authentication: What It Fixes and Costs
Passwordless authentication removes a bad first barrier, but email delivery, shared inboxes and expiry rules still need product and security decisions.
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React Native vs Native iOS: An Honest Decision Guide
A practical React Native versus native iOS decision guide from shipping food logging, travel, audio, image editing and WidgetKit apps in real production.
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Rails SQLite Deployment: Single Server or Postgres?
A practical Rails SQLite deployment decision guide: when one server, Solid Queue and Solid Cache fit, and when managed PostgreSQL is safer in production.
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Rails Stack 2026: Rails 8.1 for Production Systems
The Rails 8.1 stack I use for serious operational software: PostgreSQL, Phlex, Hotwire, Solid Queue and Active Storage, tested against real production data.