What We Learned Building It
Engineering notes from our own production systems: architecture decisions, migrations, the patterns that held, and the ones that broke. Written for the person who has to implement it.
Nobody Got the Password Reset, and Two Different Reasons Why
Two systems decide whether a reset email arrives, they fail identically from the customer's side, and confusing them cost us weeks. Plus the DNS write that nearly deleted a record we were not editing.
9 min read · Sep 2026
The Agent That Cannot See My Tax File
An AI agent that has read a company's strategy, brand, product and marketing records, and cannot reach the tax ID, the bank statements or the source code. Not by policy. By a check that refuses to finish.
7 min read · Sep 2026
A Title and an Empty Div: What AI Crawlers See When Your Site Is a React App
We fetched our own homepage the way a crawler does and got the title, then nothing. Every page on the site was invisible to Bing, to DuckDuckGo, and to every crawler behind an AI answer. Google was the only client that had ever seen it, and that was exactly why it took months to notice.
10 min read · Aug 2026
Every Shared Link Showed the Homepage: Prerendering a React SPA on Amplify
The per-route metadata was already correct and Google could see it. Every link posted to LinkedIn or Facebook still showed the homepage, because the crawlers that decide what a shared link looks like never run JavaScript. Fixing it meant finding a canonical tag that told Google all 31 pages were duplicates, and a hosting rule that made the obvious fix impossible.
7 min read · Aug 2026
Rebuilding the Infrastructure: One Cluttered AWS Account Into Four
Two live products shared one AWS account, three deployment systems, and a single disk. Over four days we rebuilt it into an account per app without taking either product down, plus the two near-misses that came closest to making that sentence untrue.
11 min read · Jul 2026
The Power of Privacy: How Ephemeral Backends Make Our Products Harder to Breach
You can't leak what you never stored. How one architectural decision, backends that hold as little user data as possible for as short a time as possible, runs through Aegis BI, MyBudgetNerd, and Thera, and why it's a security strategy, not just a privacy stance.
10 min read · Jul 2026
From One Page Indexed to All 27: Fixing a Search Console Crawl Block
Google had indexed exactly one page and kept rejecting the sitemap with "Couldn't fetch." The cause was not the site. It was a protocol mismatch in Search Console.
3 min read · Jul 2026
SEO for a React SPA: Making Every Route Visible to Search
A React single-page app looks like one generic page to search engines. The playbook that fixed that here: per-route metadata, clean URLs, structured data, a self-generating sitemap. And the part it got wrong, which we did not find until two months later.
5 min read · Jun 2026
Designing Executive Dashboards People Actually Use
Most dashboards are chart collections nobody opens twice. Decision-first design builds around operating questions and treats alerts as the product.
2 min read · Jun 2026
Practical Forecasting for Small-Business Finance
You don't need a data science team to forecast cash and revenue. You need clean history, honest uncertainty, and models you can explain to whoever bets on them.
2 min read · May 2026
AI Agents with a Human in the Loop: Trustworthy Automation
The AI agents that survive real operations share one principle: they recommend, humans decide. How we build agents that earn trust rather than demand it.
2 min read · May 2026
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