Insights

Notes from thebuild floor.

Practical engineering writing on shipping eLearning, fintech, and AI products, architecture decisions, tradeoffs, and lessons from production.

Featured · Engineering

Scaling Multi-Tenant LMS Architecture: Lessons from 50K Monthly Active Learners

A single-tenant LMS that fell over at 10K test users, rebuilt to serve 50K monthly learners across 23 institutions at 89ms average. Here's what actually moved the needle.

10 min read·Jun 18, 2026

Product

How We Ship MVPs in 6 Weeks Without Cutting Corners

Six weeks, production-grade, no 2am heroics. The work isn't coding faster, it's deciding what not to build and writing down every shortcut you take.

8 min read·Jun 18, 2026

AI

Observability for AI Apps: Traces, Costs, Hallucinations, and Feedback Loops

Your APM says the system is up while the model lies, loops, and quietly drifts. Here's the observability stack we actually run for production LLM apps.

12 min read·Jun 18, 2026

Fintech

Payments Integration Checklist: Stripe, Adyen, Checkout.com and Failure Modes

Engineering notes, once a month

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Stripe, Adyen, and Checkout.com are easy to call and easy to get catastrophically wrong. The money lives in the webhooks, idempotency keys, and the reconciliation job nobody wants to own.

Notes from thebuild floor.

Scaling Multi-Tenant LMS Architecture: Lessons from 50K Monthly Active Learners

How We Ship MVPs in 6 Weeks Without Cutting Corners

Observability for AI Apps: Traces, Costs, Hallucinations, and Feedback Loops

Payments Integration Checklist: Stripe, Adyen, Checkout.com and Failure Modes

Engineering notes, once a month

CI/CD That Actually Ships: Our Practical Pipeline for Web Apps

KYC, AML, and Risk: What to Build First (and What to Defer)

Choosing the Right RAG Architecture: Vector Search vs Hybrid vs Graph

LLM Evaluation Playbook: How We Measure Quality Beyond 'Vibes'

PCI Compliance for Fintech Startups: A Practical Roadmap

Design Systems for Startups: How We Move Fast Without UI Chaos

Security-by-Default for Fintech MVPs: Threat Modeling in a Week

From Monolith to Modular: A Migration Strategy That Doesn't Kill Delivery

Multi-Agent Systems in Production: What Breaks First

RAG in Production: 5 Pitfalls We Learned the Hard Way