Decisions from real systems.
Architecture is most useful when its constraints, rejected options, and accepted trade-offs remain visible. These notes unpack decisions made while taking real products from brief to production. They show what worked, what failed, and what the evidence changed.
sources: Client engagements and the founder’s wider engineering experience.
- 01
Architecture11 min read
Static, edge, or live: decided per path
A production storefront is prerendered to Cloudflare Pages, while one Kotlin origin handles every money path and the publishing workflows reduce content drift to a minimum with controls provided to operators.
- 02
Product engineering9 min read
Availability is a decision, not a property
A product can be published, discoverable, offered, and fulfillable on different terms. Store those facts separately, let placements combine rules with curation, and resolve the customer-facing answer in context.
- 03
Delivery10 min read
Handover is part of the product
An effective handover is designed into delivery: role-specific guides are built and checked like software, alerts point to actionable runbooks, releases remain controlled and auditable, and ownership boundaries are explicit.
- 04
Reliability9 min read
What six billion requests a day teaches you about smaller systems
Budgets, partial failure, operations, and the cost of every boundary: four lessons from Adobe-scale infrastructure, resized for a single small service.
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