NocturnNotes · Engineering
What we learned building it.
Long-form notes from the products on this site. Decisions, trade-offs and the parts that were expensive to learn — written down so the next project starts further ahead.
A spec sheet is a data model
Manufacturers publish drills and grinders in PDFs, marketplace listings and prose. A comparison only becomes possible when every product maps to the same fields.
Publishing cadence is an engineering problem
A news site does not fail because it lacks a CMS. It fails when the publishing stops. Notes from a finance site run by a scheduled Python pipeline.
The release is not the finish line
A launch is a demo until health checks, a way back, backups, error tracking and a runbook are in place. Operations is part of the product.
Eight businesses, one codebase
Vertical SaaS tempts you to fork per sector. Yanında POS changes the vocabulary, defaults and menus instead — and keeps one product to maintain.
A till is a distributed system
Offline sales, kitchen screens, receipt printers and fiscal numbering all fail in different ways. The design starts by assuming the network and the hardware will misbehave.
A page is a query, not a template
Programmatic SEO earns a bad name when one template is copied across a thousand place names. The pages that work start from a question and a data model that can answer it.
Scanning a URL without becoming an SSRF proxy
A public scanner that fetches arbitrary URLs is an invitation to reach the network behind it. The defences that matter are boring and sequential.
Put the invariant in the database
Application code is the easiest place to validate. It is also the easiest place for a rule to be bypassed. Notes from building an append-only ledger.