The notes I would have wanted at fifteen.
Long form pieces on shipping production systems, scaling SaaS, hiring engineers, AI integration, and the engineering decisions behind Yashveer Labs.
799 posts · page 31 of 34
- SaaS Architecture and Scaling
Time Zones, Locales, and Currencies: The Three Horsemen of SaaS Apocalypse
Time zones, locales, and currencies are each a trap on their own. Together they are the reason international SaaS launches get delayed, customer data gets corrupted, and engineers stop sleeping. Here is how to handle all three correctly.
12 min read
- SaaS Architecture and Scaling
The Customer Configuration Problem: How SaaS Companies Handle It Badly
Why customer configuration in SaaS is harder than it looks, the patterns that scale, and the ones that become a maintenance nightmare by year two.
12 min read
- SaaS Architecture and Scaling
Trunk Based Development for SaaS Teams
Long-lived feature branches are a coordination tax. Trunk based development replaces them with short-lived branches, feature flags, and a single integration point. The teams that practice it ship faster with fewer integration incidents.
11 min read
- SaaS Architecture and Scaling
The User Impersonation Feature: Building It Securely
User impersonation is the support feature that most SaaS products build badly or do not build at all. Done correctly, it cuts support resolution time dramatically. Done incorrectly, it is an audit failure and a security liability.
12 min read
- SaaS Architecture and Scaling
The Reporting Layer: A SaaS Story of Patience and OLAP
Every SaaS eventually needs a reporting layer. Most teams build it too late, design it against the wrong database, and spend the next year paying for it. Here is what a reporting layer actually looks like and when to build it.
12 min read
- SaaS Architecture and Scaling
The Search Problem: Why Adding It Late Always Hurts
Search is one of the few features where retrofitting hurts more than the original build. The data model, the indexing strategy, and the query experience all need to be designed together. Teams that add search late pay for it twice.
11 min read
- SaaS Architecture and Scaling
The Notification System: A Bigger Project Than Founders Realize
Every SaaS needs a notification system. Most founders bolt one on and spend the next two years paying the interest on that decision. Here is what a real notification system looks like before you commit to the wrong shape.
12 min read
- SaaS Architecture and Scaling
Workflow Engines: When You Need Temporal, When You Need Cron
Cron, a job queue, and a workflow engine are three different tools for three different problems. Picking the wrong one costs months. Here is a clear decision map.
12 min read
- SaaS Architecture and Scaling
The Operator Dashboard: A SaaS Founder's Forgotten Asset
The operator dashboard is the internal tool your team uses to support customers, debug problems, and run the business. Most SaaS founders build it last. The ones who build it early run a tighter operation and support customers faster.
11 min read
- SaaS Architecture and Scaling
Why Your SaaS Should Have a Job Queue From Day One
Most SaaS products process too much work synchronously. The fix is simple and cheap at the start. It becomes expensive and painful if you wait.
12 min read
- SaaS Architecture and Scaling
Webhooks: The Reliable Pattern That Most Companies Get Wrong
Webhooks look simple until they are not. Delivery failures, ordering problems, and missing retry logic turn a straightforward integration pattern into a support burden. Here is how to build them correctly from the start.
12 min read
- SaaS Architecture and Scaling
The Tenant Aware Permission System: A SaaS Engineer's Guide
Permissions in a multi-tenant SaaS are not just about what a user can do. They are about what a user can do within a specific organization. Getting the data model wrong early means either rebuilding it under sales pressure or shipping a permission system that enterprise buyers will not accept.
12 min read
- SaaS Architecture and Scaling
The First Time a User Costs You Money: SaaS Unit Economics for Engineers
How to think about the cost structure of SaaS products from an engineering perspective -- and how architectural decisions affect the unit economics.
12 min read
- SaaS Architecture and Scaling
The Database You Did Not Think You Needed: When to Add Redis, Elasticsearch, or ClickHouse
When your primary database is no longer the right tool for caching, search, or analytics, and what to use instead.
12 min read
- SaaS Architecture and Scaling
The Hidden Cost of Eventual Consistency: A SaaS Postmortem
How a team adopted eventual consistency for performance gains and spent months fixing the edge cases that turned customer data stale at exactly the wrong moment.
12 min read
- SaaS Architecture and Scaling
The Stateless API: Building Backends That Scale Horizontally
A stateless API is the simplest scaling primitive available. When the server holds no session state, every request can land on any instance. That property is what makes horizontal scaling work. The teams that skip this design decision pay for it the first time they try to add a second server.
11 min read
- SaaS Architecture and Scaling
The Modular Monolith: How to Buy Yourself Two Years
The modular monolith is the architecture that avoids both distributed system complexity and big-ball-of-mud coupling -- here is how to structure it.
12 min read
- Hiring Developers, Freelancers, and Agencies
The Hiring Funnel for Engineering Roles: From Applied to Signed
The complete engineering hiring funnel -- stages, conversion rates, timelines, and the specific failures that cause good candidates to drop out before signing.
12 min read
- Hiring Developers, Freelancers, and Agencies
Why Most Tech Recruiting Firms Send You The Wrong People
Working notes on why most tech recruiting firms send you the wrong people. Written for founders, engineers, and operators who want a clear read on hiring developers, freelancers, and agencies from someone who has shipped the work.
11 min read
- Hiring Developers, Freelancers, and Agencies
The Recruiter Engineer Relationship: How to Make It Work
Most recruiters and engineers talk past each other. The ones who build lasting relationships share a small set of habits on both sides. Here is what those habits look like and why they are worth building.
12 min read
- Hiring Developers, Freelancers, and Agencies
The Annual Engineering Review That Engineers Actually Find Useful
What the annual engineering review looks like when it is honest, specific, and actually useful to the engineer sitting across from you.
12 min read
- Hiring Developers, Freelancers, and Agencies
The Senior Developer Test: Architecture, Tradeoffs, Communication
Most titles on a resume lie. The senior developer test is three questions about architecture, tradeoffs, and communication that separate engineers who can lead a build from engineers who can only follow one.
12 min read
- Hiring Developers, Freelancers, and Agencies
Why I Stopped Asking Whiteboard Coding Questions
Whiteboard coding interviews were designed for a specific kind of hiring problem inside large engineering organizations. They solve almost nothing for founders and small teams, and they filter out a lot of the right people.
11 min read
- Hiring Developers, Freelancers, and Agencies
The First Thirty Days: Setting a New Developer Up for Success
How to structure the first thirty days with a new developer or contractor so they become productive fast and build the right habits from the start.
12 min read
More than blog posts.
The Labs folder has the experiments themselves. The Systems folder has the stack and architecture. The Journey folder has the timeline. Pick whichever pulls you.