Journal
Notes from the practice.
Writing about what we build, why we pick what we pick, and what enterprise software has to survive to earn the name. Comparison pieces, technical tutorials, and the occasional thesis.
Shipping Software You Can Bet a Career On
The vendor-tool graveyard has a cost no pricing page shows: the career risk of picking wrong. After two decades of shipping enterprise software, we are opening a holding company around one thesis — software worth keeping.
Read entry
Vault: A Shopify Promotions Engine With a Pre-Launch Risk Audit
Shopify discount apps fail quietly — missing end dates, gift-stacking chains, negative-margin pairs, POS drift. Vault ships 22 discount types behind one wizard, with a pre-launch risk audit that catches the leaks before a campaign goes live.
Read entry
RevenueCat Alternatives for Self-Hosting Teams (2026)
RevenueCat is the category default, and for good reason. It is also closed-source and hosted-only. When your subscription data is a compliance artifact or your team has crossed the per-event pricing threshold, the alternatives worth evaluating are OpenRevKit, Adapty, and Glassfy.
Read entry
OpenRevKit: Entitlement-Centric Subscriptions, Open Source
SKU-centric subscription code rots the moment pricing changes. OpenRevKit ships an entitlement-centric model across Apple, Google, Stripe, Amazon, and Roku — clients branch on what a customer can do, not what they bought. Self-host the open-source build, or use the hosted service.
Read entry
How to Stack Shopify Discounts Without Breaking Margin
Shopify's native combination rules are too coarse for layered promotions. Five real stacking patterns — BOGO with percentage off, tag-gated threshold discounts, bundle-plus-tier, time-window velocity, and free-gift unlocks — each with the failure mode that burns merchants and the guardrail that prevents it.
Read entry
InvokePlane: Observability Built for Agents, Not Chatbots
Chatbot tracing tools flatten agents into linear traces. Agents branch, retry, tool-call, get interrupted. InvokePlane ships streaming sessions, tenant-owned model keys, multi-tenant isolation, and eval-gated publishing — an observability and control plane for teams shipping agents into production.
Read entry
Shopify Discount Apps Compared: Vault vs Discounty vs Bold vs BOGOS
Four names dominate the Shopify App Store for discount and promotion apps. Compare Vault, Discounty, Bold Discounts, and BOGOS on stacking rules, pre-launch audit, POS handling, customer-tag gating, and pricing. A feature matrix plus the trade-offs a matrix can't carry.
Read entry
LangSmith Alternatives for Multi-Tenant AI Platforms
LangSmith presumes a single org with a single key pool. Multi-tenant AI platforms need per-tenant key isolation, per-tenant eval gates, and session-scoped traces. Compare LangSmith, Langfuse, Helicone, and InvokePlane on those axes, with the trade-offs that matter.
Read entry
How to Ship Cross-Platform Subscriptions Without SKU Hell
Subscription SKU sprawl compounds exponentially per store. Better spreadsheets do not fix it. The fix is a provisioning layer that treats SKUs as derived artifacts of entitlements — the client branches on capabilities, the server manages the mapping to store-specific products.
Read entry
RdyRack: A Native macOS Grid for Parallel AI Work
A native macOS editor for solo engineers running four parallel work streams. Grid terminals, AI panels alongside shells, broadcast input across panes, right-click a stack trace into a new Claude session. Opinionated, dark, fast.
Read entry