Technical Insights
In-depth technical articles, architectural best practices, and strategic perspectives on software engineering.
Engineering Vowly Event: digital wedding invitations and online RSVP
A wedding invitation is a distributed systems problem wearing a nice dress: one message, hundreds of recipients, and a guest list that keeps changing until the week of the event.
Read- Platform Building
Vowly Store: selling handmade wedding stationery across Europe
Every order is manufactured after it is placed, personalised with the customer's own words, and shipped across a dozen tax and delivery regimes. Made-to-order commerce is not retail.
8 min read - Platform Building
Paperly: turning a photo upload into a printed poster the same day
A customer uploads a phone photo and expects a 70×100 cm poster on their wall in three days. Everything between those two moments is an engineering problem with a deadline attached.
7 min read - Architecture
Designing a personalisation pipeline for print-on-demand
Between a text field on a product page and a file a printing press will accept, there are five stages and about a dozen ways to ruin an order. Here is how we lay them out.
9 min read - Performance
Making a Shopify storefront fast without fighting the platform
Most slow Shopify stores are not slow because of Shopify. They are slow because of what was added to them, one app at a time, over two years.
7 min read - Integrations
Localising an e-commerce store for Europe: language, currency and delivery
Translating the interface is the easy quarter of the work. The rest is pricing, delivery thresholds, address formats, tax and the URL structure you will be stuck with.
8 min read