Field Notes
Things I've figured out in production, written down so you don't have to figure them out the hard way.
Latest
MVP & Development Cost ·
How to Choose a Software Development Company as a Startup
Eight questions to ask before you sign, including how they use AI, the red flags to look for in a proposal, and how to compare quotes fairly, even if you are not technical.
Founder Decisions ·
Ketika C-level Kembali Ngoding, Lalu Bagaimana Nasib Software Engineer?
sudah benar yang punya cita - cita ternak ayam, ke sawah dan buka kolam lele
Founder Decisions ·
Most of Your Software Process Is Cosplay
A project was 5 CRUD screens and 1 screen reading a materialized view. It still took tickets, story points, sprint ceremony, design review, and a pipeline before anyone wrote a line of code. Where that process actually comes from, and when it earns its place.
Engineering ·
Elasticsearch in Production Is Not a YouTube Tutorial
Every YouTube tutorial makes Elasticsearch look easy. Then you run it in production. A node pegged its CPU and stopped answering queries, holding just 4.2 GB at 39% heap. It hadn't failed. The setup around it had: a schema never shaped for its queries, and storage that was never bounded. Here's what the tutorials leave out.
Engineering ·
One Million CCTV Events a Day in a 512 MB Container
A million camera events a day is only twelve a second. The real work is keeping one fragile NVR stream alive on the smallest container on a shared box. Why Go and the actor model fit the shape of the problem.
Engineering ·
Work-Stealing from First Principles
Tokio, Go, and Java's ForkJoinPool all use work-stealing. I learned the algorithm by implementing the Chase-Lev variant from scratch in Rust, building up from load distribution to per-worker deques, CAS, and memory ordering.
AI-Native Development ·
Cursor vs Claude Code: A Founder's Pricing Teardown
Cursor pays Anthropic $650M/year while earning $500M. I break down pricing, trust, business model risk, and why I chose the $100/month option with no middleman.
AI-Native Development ·
GitNexus Benchmark: Graph-Indexed Retrieval vs Claude Code's Native Exploration
Does graph-indexed retrieval actually beat Claude Code's native codebase exploration? I ran the same architectural question both ways. $0.52 vs $0.39, 38 tool calls vs 12, and the KuzuDB internals that explain the difference.
AI-Native Development ·
I Built an AI Agent That Runs Untrusted Code to Find Security Threats
877,000 malicious packages and counting. I used Upstash Box to build a sandboxed AI security scanner that does both static and dynamic analysis.
Founder Decisions ·
How to Build Your Startup's Website in 2026
WordPress, Webflow, Next.js, or Astro? A real comparison, and how this site was actually built.
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