Field notes
What we learned building the last one.
Written by the engineers who hit the problem, published when there's something worth saying. No content calendar.
Engineering
Latest
Your Lighthouse score is not a performance budget
A score is a snapshot. A budget is a build that fails. Here is the CI config we put on every project, and the three numbers we hold it to.
Engineering
Your Lighthouse score is not a performance budget
A score is a snapshot. A budget is a build that fails. Here is the CI config we put on every project, and the three numbers we hold it to.
Applied AI
Ship the eval before you ship the assistant
Nobody notices a retrieval assistant getting worse until a customer does. We write the test set first — and we let the client grade it.
Practice
RTL is a layout problem, not a translation problem
Nine things that break when you flip a GCC site into Arabic, and the logical-property defaults that stop them breaking again.
Applied AI
Streaming transcription demos well and ships badly
Why we replaced live streaming with press-and-hold on RetailDirect, and what a stairwell on 4G taught us about latency budgets.
Practice
Price the scope line by line, then let them cut lines
Fixed-price projects fail on change requests. Itemising the estimate turns an argument about money into a decision about features.
Engineering
You probably don't need a vector database
pgvector inside the Postgres you already operate beats a second datastore for almost every project we've scoped in the last two years.
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