Our Blog

Notes from the work

What we have learned building and rescuing products for SaaS companies and startups — architecture, AI, security, delivery. No listicles, no reheated press releases.

Data & Analytics

Analytics: Planning the Right Database

Row store or column store, one database or two, warehouse or lakehouse. How to choose an analytics database from the questions your business actually asks.

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Software Architecture

SSE vs WebSockets vs Webhooks vs Polling

Four ways to move a message when it is ready rather than when someone asks. What each one costs at your load, and the decision rule that picks between them.

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Software Architecture

Realtime Applications: What They Actually Require

Realtime is not a feature you add. It changes your connection model, your state model, your deployment and your failure modes. What to plan for before you promise it.

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Security

Web Security: The Defences That Earn Their Keep

Most breaches are not clever. They are a missing check on a route nobody remembered. A practical tour of the OWASP risks that actually reach production, and the layered defences that stop them.

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Data Privacy

GDPR Compliance

What GDPR actually asks of a product team, which obligations bite hardest for SaaS, and the practical steps that get you compliant without stalling the roadmap.

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UX

Gamification & Business

Points, badges and leaderboards only work when they are wired to something the business actually cares about. How to design gamification that survives contact with real users.

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Software Architecture

Modern Web Architectures: Part 2

SPAs, PWAs and API-first delivery. The second half of our tour through the choices that shape how a modern web product is built and shipped.

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Software Architecture

Modern Web Architectures: Part 1

Monoliths, microservices and serverless. What each one buys you, what it costs, and how to pick without cargo-culting whatever the last conference talk recommended.

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Ruby & Rails

Ruby on Rails 8: The No-PaaS Release

Solid Queue, Solid Cache, Solid Cable and Kamal 2. Rails 8 removed the reasons most teams reached for a PaaS and a pile of infrastructure. What it means in practice.

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Ruby & Rails

Ruby on Rails 7: HTML Over the Wire

Hotwire, import maps and a default stack with no Node build step. Rails 7 made a real argument that most applications never needed a SPA - and it mostly holds up.

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