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Real Talk on Websites & Engineering

Practical advice for business owners who need a working website, and deep-dives for developers who need to know why things break.

4 articles

Website Advice for Business Owners

Plain-English guides to the website problems that quietly cost you customers — broken contact forms, slow mobile pages, and the work worth automating first. No jargon, no upsell.

For Business Owners4 min read

Your Contact Form Is Broken and You Have No Idea

The form shows a green tick. You think leads are coming in. They're not. Broken contact forms are the most common — and most expensive — silent failure on small business websites. Here's how to find out if yours is one of them.

Most business owners haven't tested their own contact form in over a year.
  • Lead Generation
  • Contact Forms
  • Quick Fix
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For Business Owners5 min read

5 Signs Your Website Is Turning Away Customers Right Now

Loads slow on mobile. Browser says 'Not Secure'. Looks broken on a phone. Last updated in 2021. Any one of these is enough to make a potential customer close the tab and call your competitor instead. Here's the checklist we run on every site we audit.

53% of mobile visitors leave a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
  • Website Audit
  • Mobile
  • Speed
  • Conversions
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1 article

Developer Hiring Guides

What developers actually cost, how the hiring routes compare, and how to bring someone on without getting burned — including the overheads most guides leave out.

Hiring Guide7 min read

How Much Does It Cost to Hire a React Developer in 2026?

Rates range from $15/hour to $150,000/year — all technically true, all useless without context. Every hiring route compared: in-house salaries with the real overhead, freelance day rates and their hidden costs, agency retainers, and the dedicated developer model.

The true cost of an in-house hire runs 25–35% above the advertised salary.
  • React
  • Hiring
  • Costs
  • Outsourcing
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3 articles

Engineering Deep-Dives

Architecture decisions and production post-mortems from projects we've shipped — multi-tenancy, real-time transports, and database performance. Written for the people who'll maintain the result.

System Design8 min read

How to Architect a Multi-Tenant SaaS Platform That Scales Without Rewriting Everything

Most developers bolt on multi-tenancy after the fact — and pay for it in production. Here's the decision framework I use upfront: shared schema vs. schema-per-tenant, row-level security in Postgres, and why your auth layer is the load-bearing wall.

The schema decision you make on day one will constrain your architecture for years.
  • PostgreSQL
  • Node.js
  • Auth
  • Scaling
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Architecture6 min read

WebSockets vs SSE (Server-Sent Events): The Decision You're Probably Getting Wrong

SSE handles 80% of real-time use cases with a fraction of the infrastructure complexity — yet teams default to WebSockets out of habit. I break down exactly when bidirectional sockets are worth the cost, and when a simple event stream leaves your backend cleaner and more observable.

If your server only pushes data and the client only reads it, you don't need a WebSocket.
  • Real-Time
  • WebSockets
  • SSE
  • Node.js
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