§ 01THE JOURNAL

Notes from the build pipeline.

Engineering deep-dives, retrospectives, and field notes from teams shipping production software. No hot takes, no thought leadership — just what we learned this week.

⌬ Server Components

React Server Components, two years in: the patterns that survived

We migrated 4 production apps to RSC. Here's what stuck, what we ripped out, and the data-fetching pattern we'd recommend to a friend.

◐ Postgres at Scale

Postgres index bloat: a debugging story (with a happy ending)

A client's queries got 40× slower over six months. The culprit wasn't query planning — it was something we'd never thought to monitor.

◈ RAG Eval Framework

Building a RAG eval framework with 200 golden questions

How we score retrieval quality, response groundedness, and citation accuracy — with a CI pipeline that blocks regressions before merge.

▢ React Native

Shipping a React Native app to 50k installs in 6 weeks

The architecture, OTA update strategy, and crash-monitoring setup we used — plus the three Expo features that genuinely saved us weeks.

☁ AWS Cost Cuts

Cutting an AWS bill by 62% without breaking production

The audit framework, the easy wins, and the one architectural change that quietly saved us the most money. Spoiler: it wasn't reserved instances.

✦ SkillNest Retro

Shipping SkillNest AI: from idea to 12k MAU in nine months

An honest retrospective — what worked, what we'd do differently, and the architectural decisions we're still living with (good and bad).