Field notes on frameworks, AI integration, software architecture and the unglamorous tools that quietly hold the modern web together. Practical, opinionated, occasionally wrong.
Latest from the studio · 17 entries
Logs are the single largest source of "we know we have the information but we can't find it" in software. Every team produces them. Most teams don't use them well. This is what we've learnt about making logs actually useful when something i…
Twelve months ago, "AI coding agent" still meant a Copilot-style autocomplete with an attitude. In 2026 it means a process you brief once and walk away from. We've shipped meaningful production work — refactors, migrations, full feature del…
CSS in 2026 is the best version of itself it has ever been. Most of the workarounds we accumulated through the 2010s — the SCSS variables, the PostCSS plugins, the CSS-in-JS libraries, the utility-class abstractions — have native equivalent…
Cloudflare Pages is now our default static host. It has been for about eighteen months. The tooling settled, the edge story matured, and the price for serious traffic is still — improbably — zero. This is the workflow we use for production …
The choice used to be simple: code ran on a server. Then it ran on a fleet of servers. Then it ran on serverless functions in one region. Now, in 2026, "where does the code run" is a real architectural decision with three credible answers —…
Bun reached 1.0 in late 2023. By early 2026, we've had it in production long enough to stop being excited and start being honest. This is what we've learned, where the runtimes diverge, and what we still leave on Node. The short version Bun…
Every year a new database promises to replace Postgres. Every year we start a new project on Postgres. This isn't inertia. It's a deliberate choice, and the reasoning has gotten stronger, not weaker, over the last five years. The case for P…
Migrating a JavaScript codebase to TypeScript is one of those projects that looks straightforward in a planning document and turns into a quarter of someone's life in practice. We've done it on three codebases of varying sizes in the last e…
Shared hosting — the cPanel, the Bluehost-style "$3.95/month" plan, the box your aunt's craft business has been on since 2014 — is in an interesting place. It hasn't died, despite ten years of predictions. But what shared hosting actually i…
The cycle since 2023 has been roughly: hype, disappointment, quiet utility. We are firmly in the "quiet utility" phase. AI tools are in most web designers' workflows now. The teams getting real leverage out of them share a set of habits wor…
Python is, by most measures, the most-used programming language in the world in 2026. That was a defensible claim five years ago and it is a stronger one now. The growth has not slowed — it has compounded, fed by AI, data, automation, and a…
For most of the web's history, "crawler" meant Googlebot. Maybe Bingbot. A handful of well-behaved bots that read your site, indexed it, and sent you human visitors in return. The trade was understood. Both sides benefited. That trade broke…
Two services need to talk. They might be in different languages, different organisations, different decades. The history of web services is a history of agreeing on a contract — and the agreement has shifted shape several times. In 2026 we …
The link-building advice of 2015 reads, in 2026, like a manual for a different internet. Guest posts on low-quality blogs, directory submissions, blog comment links — Google has been ignoring or actively penalising most of this for nearly a…
Every B2B office, conference venue, and shared workspace has the same problem: people show up, you need to know who they are, what they're here for, who is hosting them, and — if regulation requires it — a defensible audit trail. The techno…
Java is not glamorous in 2026. It is also not going anywhere. If anything, the language and runtime are in the best shape they've been in for a decade — virtual threads, pattern matching, records, and a JIT that consistently outperforms mos…
The pitch hasn't changed much in fifteen years: a good PHP framework saves you from writing the dull parts of every web app and gives the next developer something they already recognise. The pitch is still true. The list of credible framewo…