Articles

Write-ups on how teams actually made their stack decisions.

Jul 2, 2026

Reading an engineering blog post without being fooled by it

Company engineering posts are useful and they are also recruiting material. Both things are true at once.

Jun 11, 2026

Your job queue is a database table until it is not

Background jobs are where small projects add infrastructure earliest and justify it least.

May 20, 2026

What Stripe understood about API versioning

Their approach is more expensive to build and considerably cheaper to live with.

May 6, 2026

Microservices solved an organisational problem you might not have

The architecture became famous through companies with thousands of engineers. The reasoning does not survive the trip to a team of six.

Apr 22, 2026

Postgres or MySQL: an answer instead of a comparison table

Both will outlast your product. Here is the short version of when the difference actually shows up.

Apr 9, 2026

The migration you are planning is probably a rewrite in disguise

Framework migrations get approved because they sound incremental. Then they take two years.

Mar 25, 2026

Boring technology is a strategy, not a personality trait

Choosing dull tools is not conservatism. It is a deliberate budget decision about where you can afford to be surprised.

Mar 8, 2026

WhatsApp had fewer engineers than your startup

A team of about fifty supported hundreds of millions of users. The language choice was real, but it was not the whole story.

Feb 19, 2026

Shopify runs on Rails, and that should end a certain argument

The claim that Rails cannot scale survives mainly because the counterexamples are inconvenient.

Feb 4, 2026

Why Discord left Go for Rust, and why that is not an argument against Go

The famous rewrite gets cited as proof that Go is slow. Read the actual post and it says something narrower and more useful.

Jan 21, 2026

Next.js vs Remix for a small SaaS

Both are solid choices for a small SaaS product. The right pick usually comes down to how your app fetches and mutates data, not raw perfor…

Dec 3, 2025

How to choose a stack for a solo MVP

The best stack for a solo project is rarely the one with the most stars on GitHub. Here is a simpler way to decide.

Nov 12, 2025

What we mean by "stack" on this site

A quick note on how we define a company's "stack" for the quiz and directory, and why some facts here are historical rather than current.