Dexsof/Journal

Insights, guides, and thinkingfrom the Dexsof team.

Practical perspectives on product, engineering, and design — written by the people actually doing the work. No SEO bait, no listicles, no AI slop.

10 essaysNew notes monthly
Featured essayAI

How we ship LLM features that hold up at 90 days

Most LLM features look great on day three. By day ninety, the prompt has rotted, the costs have tripled, and the team is afraid to touch the eval suite — if there even is one. The playbook we use on every engagement: evals first, retrieval second, prompts last, and a real observability stack from the start.

Sara IqbalStaff AI Engineer
May 12, 202614 min read
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The archive

Browse by topic.

Engineering deep dives, design systems, AI in production, and honest notes on running a software company.

Engineering
Apr 28, 202611 min read

Why we still pick Postgres in 2026

JSON, full-text search, vector embeddings, time-series, queues. Postgres now does the job of six tools — here’s where it shines and where it absolutely doesn’t.

Daniyal KhanPrincipal Engineer
Company
Apr 04, 20269 min read

Embedded squad vs fixed-scope: a candid breakdown

Which engagement model fits which problem? An honest table from seven years of running both — including the failure modes nobody puts on a landing page.

Priya AnandCo-founder · CEO
AI
Mar 22, 202613 min read

What we learned shipping AI to 600 clinicians

Eight months of Verda, from first eval set to GA. Where Claude beat GPT-4, where prompts were the wrong abstraction, and the one UX decision that doubled adoption.

Hira MalikHead of Design
Engineering
Mar 08, 202610 min read

SOC 2 for engineering teams, the honest version

What the audit actually checks, what it doesn’t, and how to get to Type II without sacrificing the developer experience your engineers came for.

Bilal TariqSRE Lead
Design
Feb 24, 20267 min read

Design tokens that survive a redesign

Tokens are easy. Surviving the first brand refresh is hard. A three-layer architecture that’s let us re-skin five products without breaking a single component.

Hira MalikHead of Design
Engineering
Feb 10, 202612 min read

Edge runtimes: when to reach, when to wait

Vercel, Cloudflare, Fly — the edge is finally mature. But there’s a sharp class of bug they introduce. A decision tree, and three war stories.

Daniyal KhanPrincipal Engineer
Company
Jan 28, 202616 min read

The cost of moving fast: a 12-week rebuild post-mortem

We delivered Helix’s treasury platform in twelve weeks. Here’s the full ledger — what we cut, what bit back, and the one decision we’d undo if we could.

Ahmed RazaCo-founder · CTO
Company
Jan 14, 20268 min read

Hiring senior engineers in 2026 (when everyone says they are)

Resumes are useless and take-homes are worse. The 90-minute paired exercise that has filtered our last 18 hires with a 100% offer-acceptance rate.

Ahmed RazaCo-founder · CTO
Engineering
Jan 02, 202610 min read

A pragmatic event-driven architecture in Postgres

You don’t need Kafka. You probably don’t need outbox patterns either. A 4-table schema and 200 lines of TypeScript that’s served us through 40-million-event days.

Omar SheikhStaff Eng · Toronto
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