Issue 04 Field Notes · Engineering · Founder Playbooks
April 2026

Notes from
the engine room.

Practical guides, founder playbooks, and engineering essays from shipping production software. No fluff — just what we wish we'd known earlier.

All articles

Showing 9 · Most recent first
01 SaaS
Founder

The real cost to build a SaaS product in 2026

Engineering hours, infrastructure, and the hidden costs nobody warns founders about — with realistic budgets.

Apr 2026 · 12 min
02 Founder
MVP

Website vs Web App: which one does your startup actually need?

Most founders pick the wrong one. Here's the simple decision tree we use to figure out where to invest first.

Mar 2026 · 8 min
03 MVP
Strategy

The ultimate guide to MVP development for founders

From scope to ship in 6–10 weeks. The framework we use to launch real products fast — without rewriting them later.

Mar 2026 · 14 min
04 Mobile
Engineering

Flutter or React Native: which should you pick in 2026?

Both are great, both have trade-offs. Our honest comparison after shipping production apps with both stacks.

Feb 2026 · 10 min
05 Engineering
DX

Why we still pick PostgreSQL over everything else

Document stores, vector DBs, edge replicas — the noise is loud. Why we keep coming back to Postgres for production.

Feb 2026 · 9 min
06 Engineering
Process

The case for shipping production code from day one

Why "we'll rewrite it later" is the most expensive sentence in software. A field-tested manifesto.

Jan 2026 · 7 min
07 Founder
Strategy

Why code ownership matters more than your dev rates

The hidden tax of working with agencies that don't transfer IP — and how to spot it before you sign.

Jan 2026 · 6 min
08 SaaS
Security

Multi-tenant architecture: what to get right on day one

Tenant isolation, row-level security, billing quotas — the early decisions that define how far your SaaS can scale.

Dec 2025 · 11 min
09 Founder
Hiring

How to evaluate a software studio before you sign the contract

Five questions that separate the studios that ship from the ones that slide. Save yourself a year of pain.

Dec 2025 · 8 min

Reading is great.
Building is better.

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