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Notes from the build.

What we've learned shipping software in African markets: architecture decisions, hard-won lessons, and the occasional post-mortem.

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Engineering19 August 20267 min read

We design for a bad connection first, and the fast ones get better too

A 3 MB JavaScript bundle is a rounding error on fibre in Amsterdam and a four-minute wait on a bus in Mutare. Building for the second case is not charity. It is just better engineering.

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Game Development30 July 20268 min read

Lua is not a toy language, and pretending it is costs you money

It is the embedded scripting layer behind an enormous amount of software you already use. Here is what we have learned building production systems on it, and where it genuinely will hurt you.

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Architecture8 July 20266 min read

Go or Rust for a real-time system: a decision we make on team, not benchmarks

Both are fast enough. Both have excellent concurrency stories. The honest tiebreaker is almost never throughput. It is who maintains this in eighteen months.

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Fintech24 June 20269 min read

What building payments in Zimbabwe teaches you that Stripe never will

Multi-currency is not a formatting problem. Reconciliation is not an afterthought. And the callback you are relying on may arrive twice, late, or never.

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Machine Learning27 May 20267 min read

The machine learning feature that never shipped

The model hit 94% accuracy in the notebook. Eleven months later it had never made a single prediction for a real user. A post-mortem on the gap between a model and a feature.

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IT Equipment6 May 20266 min read

Buying laptops for a twenty-person team: the questions nobody asks until it hurts

The cheapest fleet is almost never the cheapest fleet. A practical guide to specifying hardware for a growing business, from people who both supply it and have to work on it.

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Engineering15 April 20266 min read

Your database is fine. Your queries are the problem.

Before you shard, cache, or move to a bigger instance, look at what your ORM is actually sending. In most systems we audit, the whole performance problem is four or five queries.

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