Thinking, in public
Field notes on design, engineering and growth — written by the people who ship the work. No thought leadership, just lessons with receipts.
RAG pitfalls we hit so you don't have to
Retrieval in production humbles everyone. The chunking trade-offs, citation bugs, stale knowledge and eval failures that taught us how RAG actually breaks.
Digital PR for links: an honest playbook
Link earning without spam: data studies people cite, expert commentary workflows, asset-led outreach, realistic conversion rates, and how to tell if it's working.
Activation metrics that mean something
Most activation metrics are flattering fictions. Find the behaviour that predicts retention, measure time-to-value honestly, defend it in the boardroom.
Template galleries: the shortcut to the aha moment
Starter templates are onboarding's best shortcut — if they're categorised by job not industry, previewed live, pruned ruthlessly and measured to activation, not clicks.
The caching layers cake: HTTP, ISR and the discipline of invalidation
A layered caching model for content-heavy sites — CDN, full-page, data and application caches — plus the purge-on-publish pattern that ends 3am incidents.
i18n beyond the strings file
The hard 20% of internationalisation: plural rules, dates and currency, RTL layout, locale-aware content modelling, and design tokens that change per language.
Local-first on the web: sync engines, honestly
What local-first architecture actually costs and buys: IndexedDB patterns, CRDT trade-offs, schema migrations, sync-status UX, and when server-first is simply right.
Islands architecture: sprinkle, don't soak
When islands beat a full SPA: hydration costs, interaction latency budgets, the pragmatic hybrid pattern we use on content-heavy sites, and the traps.
A testing strategy that ships: what to test, what to skip, what to delete
Our testing pyramid, rebuilt for reality: contract-first unit tests, a thin layer of Playwright journeys, flake budgets, and a CI bill we defend monthly.
The spreadsheet migration is the real onboarding
Most B2B onboarding is a spreadsheet migration wearing a wizard's hat. Column mapping, dry-run imports, inline validation, and the week-one trust dividend.
Running design critiques that sharpen instead of flatten
Our studio's critique framework: roles, timing, the 'specific or silent' rule, and critiquing outcomes instead of taste. Includes a one-page checklist.
Icon systems: the quietest, hardest-working brand asset
Icons do more daily brand work than your logo. How to design an icon system: grids, metaphor consistency, custom vs library, motion rules, and style guides that survive.