Sign in with Apple: mandatory, deceptively easy to get wrong
Under App Store Guideline 4.8, any iOS app that offers third-party login has to offer Sign in with Apple too. Practical notes…
Six design principles behind batch pipelines that actually survive production
Shared patterns from three projects where I built reporting, data migration, and nightly aggregation pipelines. Chunking, checkpoints, retry discipline, idempotency.
Designing on-call rotation: from solo developer to a real team
I was solo and on-call 24/7 for 5 years. Once the team grew, building a healthy rotation became its own discipline. Thoughts…
Image optimization that actually moves LCP: WebP, AVIF, and responsive images
On one e-commerce project, 70% of the page weight was images. Moving to WebP, trying AVIF, and tightening srcset discipline cut LCP…
gRPC vs REST: when each one actually makes sense
I moved to gRPC on microservice projects and stayed on REST for monoliths. A side-by-side comparison with the decision criteria that tell…
Live Activities and Dynamic Island: lessons from 2 production apps
Live Activities shipped with iOS 16, the Dynamic Island with the iPhone 14 Pro. Here are the ActivityKit patterns I picked up…
5 things I missed while scaling background job queues
Across Redis + BullMQ, RabbitMQ, and SQS, I've relearned the same 5 lessons about scaling job queues: poison messages, retry storms, priority…
Retrospectives that solve problems, not fill in forms
For many teams, the retrospective has become a 30-minute formality. I'm sharing the structure, facilitation techniques, and action-item discipline that turn it…
Optimising INP: where JavaScript actually hurts you
INP replaced FID in Core Web Vitals in 2024 and it's a tougher metric. I worked through how JavaScript actually drives INP…
Custom post types and Gutenberg blocks: native registration instead of ACF
I'd grown used to defining custom post types and blocks with ACF. Moving to native register_post_type and register_block_type changed how clean the…
Moving SOAP to REST: three migrations, 18 months of lessons
Common lessons from three SOAP to REST migrations on bank, ERP, and government integrations. Gateway pattern, envelope conversion, and the strategy for…
ASO notes from shipping 12 App Store apps
Some of my apps pull 60% of installs from ASO, others barely grow. Keyword strategy, screenshot order, preview video, localisation: the decisions…