Dispatches from the work in progress
The Tap That Went Nowhere The button worked. The SDK log said the event was queued, then flushed. The server came back with {"status":"Ok"}. The dashboard was empty. I was adding analytics to a journal screen in a Flutter app - nothing exotic, just a
When I first started working with navigation in Flutter, I thought the concept was fairly simple: A route takes you from one screen to another. You have a route, you navigate to it, and the corresponding screen opens. But while working on a real navigation flow involving deep links, route
How we approached packaging as an engineering problem rather than simply adding more material. Introduction Packaging is easy to treat as the last step in product development. The product gets designed, the manufacturing process gets defined, and then the question becomes: how do we put it in a box and
Events are how our modular monolith keeps its seams sealed. This is the transactional outbox, hash chain and four delivery lanes we built on DynamoDB, and the two ways it failed silently before we made it prove itself.
How a migration can pass reconciliation at every environment and still ship a broken system — and what we verify instead. A matching count proves the rows arrived. It does not prove the system can find them, identify them, or alert anyone when they stop working. We learned that the hard
Introduction In early bring-up, time looks like a solved problem. The SoC has an RTC. A 32.768 kHz crystal is fitted on the low-frequency oscillator. The board boots, the network connects, NTP sets the clock, and every log line carries a sensible date. Then the product is unplugged. Power
A camera module's job sounds simple: take a picture of the pet, shrink it, compress it, save it. On a microcontroller-class part, the naive version of that pipeline eats the processor. Converting a raw sensor frame into colour is millions of multiply-adds; resizing it is millions more; JPEG-compressing
A daily recap job that ran every night, never threw an error, and almost never wrote anything. The cause was a query flag that promised "newest first" and delivered something else. One of our features writes a short daily recap for each pet, built from that day'
The Hidden Cost of Peak Search Performance Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) graphs have rightfully earned their reputation as the speed demons of vector search, delivering sub-millisecond retrieval times across millions of embeddings. However, this lightning-fast performance comes with a steep trade-off: high RAM consumption. Because HNSW relies on keeping
Introduction Most embedded systems are designed assuming that the required power will always be available. The power supply is selected based on: * Maximum processor load * Peak peripheral consumption * Worst-case communication activity * Sensor requirements The calculation looks simple: Available Power > Maximum Expected Load But real products rarely operate in perfectly
A firmware build has one job that is easy to state and hard to guarantee: the image that comes out must contain every feature you believe you put in. "The build passed" feels like proof. It isn't. A build system reports on the steps it ran
INTRO Every team has an architecture document. Very few teams have an architecture. The gap between the two is where most mobile codebases quietly rot. Someone writes "features must not import each other." Six months and four contractors later, half the modules import each other, and the document
How early user feedback became formal engineering inputs for Everbowl. Introduction A product rarely fails the same way it fails on a test bench. In the lab, we control the load, the environment, the assembly process, and how the product gets handled. In someone's home, none of that
When I first started looking at this problem, it looked like a simple UI improvement. The idea was straightforward: instead of asking users to understand everything about the product themselves, we could ask a few simple questions and use their answers to guide them toward a more relevant experience. But
The problem An owner reports her dog missing. The app raises an emergency: a row on the server, and an ongoing alert on her lock screen that survives the app being killed. Two days later the dog comes home. She taps Found. The alert disappears. She relaunches the app that
