Blog
Notes, thoughts, and deep dives on AI, systems architecture, and software engineering — from over a decade building products.
Showing 1–10 of 44 posts
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How to Do Product Development: What to Include, What to Avoid
A long-form, evidence-backed guide to product development with industry examples, practical frameworks, and hard-earned lessons.
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How to Release an MVP When Your Product Has Too Many Features
Scoping an MVP for a feature-rich system: cut by actor instead of by feature, ship one vertical slice, defer features without deleting the value, decide the buckets in advance, and make deferral reversible with toggles instead of migrations.
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The Model Won't Ask You Back
Why a thin question becomes a confident wrong answer, which parts of the prompting folklore are already stale, and why it is a writing skill.
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Jev Returns a Type, Not a String
JEV returns typed values with probabilities instead of text. What that changes for AI model routing: the control plane, the failure modes, the benchmarks.
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SEO Is a Distributed System
How search ranking actually works: the crawl subsystem and its budget, the inverted index, canonicalisation as clustering, and the ranking cascade.
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Answer Engine Optimization Is an Architecture Problem
AEO as systems architecture: the indexing and query planes, chunking as the unit of ranking, why citation is separate from retrieval, and measuring lift.
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Implementing Wizards the Right Way
Building multi-step wizards: Duolingo's one-question onboarding, Stripe Connect's branching, and the anti-patterns that make users quit.
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How to Make an MVP in the AI Era
What an MVP needs now that AI makes building nearly free: the traps to avoid, and why the constraint moved to testing assumptions with real customers.
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10 Event-Driven Architecture Questions That Separate Architects from Framework Users
Ten questions that separate framework users from distributed-systems engineers: idempotency, ordering, sagas, observability, and when not to use events.
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Beyond Email: Dual-Channel SMS Catching, 14 MCP Tools, and Email Analysis in Postwire
Postwire v0.2 adds SMS catching with Twilio webhooks, 14 MCP tools for AI agents, and Litmus-style email analysis to the local mail catcher.