Engineering notes

How we build software.

The principles our teams argue about, written down. They decide what ships and what gets sent back.

PERFORMANCE

The 100ms threshold

Below 100ms an interface stops feeling like a request and starts feeling like a tool. Every screen is budgeted against that line before it ships.

ARCHITECTURE

Local-first by default

State lives on the device and syncs when it can. Offline stops being an error state and becomes the normal case that happens to reconnect.

PRIVACY

Data without custody

We collect the minimum a feature needs to work. What never leaves the machine can never leak.

CRAFT

Interface is engineering

Motion, spacing and focus order are the parts of a system users actually touch, so they get reviewed as strictly as code.

DELIVERY

Boring deployments

Small diffs, canary rollouts, armed rollbacks. Shipping 120 times a week is only safe when each release is unremarkable.

TOOLING

Own the sharp edges

Build systems, CLIs and internal engines get the same design attention as customer-facing product. Slow tooling compounds into slow software.

aestheticmade-cli — zsh — 120×32