Engineering
Perspectives.
Lessons from shipping production software with senior-only teams — architecture, culture, AI, and everything in between.
More Articles
Async-First Engineering: How We Work Across 8 Time Zones Without Meetings
Daily standups are a 1970s management invention. We run an async-first engineering culture across 8 countries — and ship faster because of it.
Milestone Billing vs. Hourly: Why We Never Bill by the Hour
Hourly billing creates misaligned incentives. The longer a project takes, the more the agency earns. We fixed this by tying every invoice to a shipped deliverable.
Next.js 15 App Router: 6 Lessons From 12 Months in Production
We've shipped Next.js 15 App Router across 8 production projects. Here's what the docs don't tell you about caching, streaming, and server components at scale.
Building AI Features That Actually Work in Production
LLMs are non-deterministic, expensive, and slow. Here's how we architect AI features that are reliable, cost-controlled, and fast enough for real users.
Kubernetes vs ECS in 2025: What We Actually Recommend
After running both in production across dozens of client projects, here's our honest take on when to use Kubernetes, when ECS wins, and when neither is the right answer.
React Native vs Flutter in 2025: A Pragmatic Comparison
We've shipped production apps in both. Here's the framework comparison that skips the benchmarks and focuses on what actually matters: developer experience, hiring, and long-term maintainability.
Technical Debt Is Not Always Bad — Here's When to Embrace It
The phrase 'technical debt' is used to justify both legitimate shortcuts and inexcusable laziness. Here's how to tell the difference and make intentional tradeoffs.
How to Scope an MVP That Actually Ships
Most MVPs fail before they launch — not because of bad code, but because of bad scoping. Here's the framework we use to define an MVP that ships in 6 weeks, not 6 months.
PostgreSQL vs MongoDB: How to Choose Without Starting a Religion War
The database debate is one of the most opinionated in engineering. Here's a framework based on actual project requirements rather than tribal loyalty.
CI/CD Pipeline Best Practices We Use on Every Project
A broken deployment pipeline is a productivity tax on every engineer, every day. Here's the setup we install on every new project from day one.
Code Review Culture That Ships: How We Keep PRs Under 24 Hours
Slow code review is one of the most common productivity killers in engineering teams. Here's how we maintain a culture where PRs get reviewed within hours, not days.
Zero Trust Architecture: The Complete Engineering Guide for 2025
Perimeter-based security is dead. Zero trust assumes breach by default — every request is verified, every connection is authenticated. Here's how to implement it without grinding your team to a halt.
OWASP Top 10 2025: A Developer's Practical Guide to Fixing Every Vulnerability
The OWASP Top 10 lists the most critical web application security risks. Here's not just what they are, but exactly how to fix each one in a modern Node.js / Next.js stack.
Docker in Production: 12 Best Practices We Apply on Every Project
Most Docker setups work in development but fail under production load. Here are the 12 practices that separate production-grade containers from development toys.
Terraform at Scale: Patterns That Don't Fall Apart at 50+ Resources
Terraform is easy to start with and hard to scale. Here are the module patterns, state management strategies, and team workflows that keep large infrastructure codebases maintainable.
API Security in 2025: The Complete Checklist for Production APIs
APIs are the attack surface of modern applications. Here's a comprehensive checklist covering authentication, rate limiting, input validation, and everything between that we apply before any API goes live.
Observability vs Monitoring: Why Dashboards Aren't Enough
Monitoring tells you when something is broken. Observability tells you why. Here's how we implement the three pillars — metrics, logs, and traces — to achieve true system understanding.
AWS Cost Optimisation: How We Cut Client Bills by 40% Without Touching Code
Cloud bills grow fast and invisibly. Here are the 10 levers we pull on every AWS account — most take under an hour to implement and the savings compound month over month.
JWT Security: 8 Common Mistakes That Get Applications Breached
JWTs are widely used and widely misunderstood. These 8 implementation mistakes have caused real-world breaches — here's how to identify and fix them in your application.
Microservices vs Monolith: The Honest Guide Nobody Writes
Microservices are oversold. Monoliths are under-defended. Here's an evidence-based framework for choosing architecture based on your actual team size, traffic, and domain complexity.
Redis in Production: 7 Patterns Beyond Simple Caching
Most teams use Redis as a key-value cache and stop there. Here are 7 production patterns — rate limiting, distributed locks, pub/sub, queues, and more — that Redis handles better than purpose-built tools.
TypeScript Patterns That Make Large Codebases Maintainable
TypeScript's type system is more powerful than most teams use. These patterns — branded types, discriminated unions, template literal types, and inferred types — eliminate entire categories of runtime bugs.
Core Web Vitals in 2025: How We Achieve Green Scores on Complex Apps
Google's Core Web Vitals directly impact search ranking and user retention. Here's the exact optimisation process we use to get complex, data-heavy applications into the green across all three metrics.
Database Query Optimisation: From 8 Seconds to 80 Milliseconds
Slow database queries are the most common performance bottleneck in web applications. Here's a systematic approach to identifying and fixing them — illustrated with real queries we optimised in production.
Kubernetes Security Hardening: 10 Controls Every Cluster Needs
Default Kubernetes configurations are optimised for developer convenience, not security. Here are the 10 security controls we implement on every production cluster before going live.
SRE Practices for Startups: What to Adopt Before You Need Them
Site Reliability Engineering was invented at Google for Google-scale problems. But the core practices — SLOs, error budgets, blameless postmortems — apply at any scale. Here's what to adopt early.
Event-Driven Architecture: Patterns, Trade-offs, and When Not to Use It
Event-driven architecture decouples services and enables async workflows — but it adds significant complexity. Here's when to reach for it, which patterns work, and the pitfalls that will hurt you.
Software Supply Chain Security: Protecting Your Build Pipeline
The SolarWinds and XZ Utils attacks proved that the build pipeline is the attack surface most teams ignore. Here's how to secure yours against dependency confusion, malicious packages, and CI/CD attacks.
Serverless vs Containers in 2025: A Cost and Complexity Comparison
The serverless vs containers debate has matured. Both are production-ready, both have legitimate use cases, and the decision tree is clearer than ever. Here's our current recommendation.
How We Hire Senior Engineers Remotely: Our Exact Process
Hiring senior engineers remotely at AlgoCrew. Our 4-step process — async challenge, architecture interview, paid trial — and how we maintain a senior-only bar across 8+ countries.
GraphQL vs REST in 2025: When Each Actually Makes Sense
The GraphQL vs REST debate has produced more heat than light. Here's a practical framework — based on shipping both in production — for choosing the right API style for your use case.
Ready to build
something exceptional?
From idea to launch in weeks, not months. Let's talk about your project.