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.
Practical perspectives on product, engineering, and design — written by the people actually doing the work. No SEO bait, no listicles, no AI slop.
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.
Engineering deep dives, design systems, AI in production, and honest notes on running a software company.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We would love to hear about it. Whether you have a project in mind or just want to talk through an idea, we are always happy to start a conversation.