Field notes
What we learned building the last thing — architecture, delivery, and the decisions we'd make differently.
Engineering
Either database will take you to ₹100 crore in revenue. So the decision is not about performance — it is about...
Design
Six weeks after handoff, the CSS had 23 shades of grey and none of them matched the Figma. The fix was not mor...
Business of Software
A fixed price is not a cheaper price — it is a price with a 20-35% risk premium and a change-request tax. A de...
Product
ONDC is a protocol, not a marketplace, and every call is fire-and-forget. This is the architecture, the Ed2551...
Engineering
Version one had a retry queue and lost 4.7% of delivery proofs. Version two made the phone the source of truth...
AI & Data
The doc chatbot gets 12% adoption and hallucinates on the questions that matter. Meanwhile a boring invoice-ex...
Cloud & DevOps
A $9,420/month AWS bill, reduced to $5,560 in six weeks. NAT Gateway charges, an idle RDS instance, 1.9 TB of...
Business of Software
The licence fee is the number everyone negotiates and the smallest number in the project. Here is the full lin...
Engineering
Double-charged customers, jobs that vanish, workers that quietly leak memory, and a payment webhook stuck behi...