The Journal
The notes I would have wanted at fifteen.
Long-form notes on shipping production systems, scaling SaaS, hiring engineers, AI integration, and the engineering decisions behind Yashveer Labs — written by founder Yashveer Singh.
Snapshots, Property Tests, and the Modern Test Toolbox
Unit tests and integration tests are not the whole story. Here is what else belongs in a serious test suite.
DevOps, Deployment, InfrastructureSLOs and SLIs for Founders: A Plain Language Guide
SLOs and SLIs turn reliability into a measurable commitment. Here is what they mean and why they matter.
Business Automation and OpsSlack Bots That Earn Their Keep
Most Slack bots get built, used for a week, and forgotten. Here is what makes the ones that stick work.
Security, Auth, and ComplianceSingle Sign On for Enterprise SaaS: SAML and OIDC Compared
SSO is a procurement requirement for enterprise deals. Here is what SAML and OIDC each mean for your engineering roadmap.
MVP Development and Startup BuildsShould Your MVP Be a Mobile App or a Web App First?
Web apps ship faster, iterate faster, and validate faster. Here is when going mobile first is worth the tradeoff.
Founder Decision FrameworksShould You Open Source Your Product? A Strategic Read
Open sourcing your product changes your distribution, your competition, and your monetization permanently.
Software Costs and BudgetingShould You Buy a No Code Solution or Hire a Developer? Cost Tradeoffs
No code starts cheaper and hits a ceiling faster. Custom development costs more and scales further. Here is the math.
MVP Development and Startup BuildsShould You Build Your MVP in Public?
Building in public generates audience and accountability. It also generates opinions from people who are not your customers.
Cross Platform and Mobile DevelopmentShould You Build for iOS or Android First as a Startup?
The platform you build first will shape your early users, revenue, and product feedback. Choose deliberately.
Founder Decision FrameworksShould You Build a Mobile App at All?
A mobile app adds cost, complexity, and app store friction. Here is when it is actually worth it.
Founder Decision FrameworksShould You Build a Marketplace, a SaaS, or a Service Business?
Three business models, three very different bets. Here is how to pick the one that matches your actual situation.
MVP Development and Startup BuildsShould Founders Code Their Own MVP? An Honest Answer
The answer depends on one question: can you ship something real in under 60 days?
SaaS Architecture and ScalingSharding Strategies for SaaS: When to Start and When to Stop Avoiding It
Sharding is a last resort, not a first move. Here is the honest decision framework for SaaS teams.
Web App and Frontend Developmentshadcn/ui in Production: A Practical Read
shadcn/ui gives you ownership over your components. Here is what that actually means in a real project.
Web App and Frontend DevelopmentSettings and Preferences: A Common Pattern Done Badly
Settings pages reveal how well an app is architected. Most of them reveal the opposite.
Security, Auth, and ComplianceSession Management for Web Apps: A Modern Take
Session management in web applications encompasses the mechanisms for maintaining authenticated state between client requests. Modern web session management involves two primary approaches: server side sessions (a session ID is stored in a cookie and maps to session state in a database or cache) and token based sessions (a JWT or similar token is issued to the client and validated on each request without server side state). The choice affects scalability, security, invalidation capability, and implementation complexity.
Performance OptimizationService Workers: When They Help and When They Hurt
Service workers are JavaScript files that run in a separate thread from the web page, intercepting network requests and enabling features like offline access, push notifications, background sync, and advanced caching strategies. They act as a programmable proxy between the browser and the network, giving developers control over how resources are fetched and cached. Service workers are the foundation of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) but are equally applicable to standard web applications that want caching or offline capabilities.
SaaS Architecture and ScalingService Decomposition: Drawing the Right Lines
Service decomposition is the architectural practice of splitting a monolithic application into distinct services that communicate over a network. The decomposition boundary defines what each service owns: its data, its logic, and its deployment lifecycle. Good decomposition produces services that can be deployed independently, scale independently, and are owned by teams independently. Poor decomposition produces distributed systems with tight coupling that is harder to operate than the original monolith.
Backend, APIs, and System DesignServerless vs Containers vs Bare Metal: A Cost and Flexibility Map
Compute models for web applications describe how application code is executed and billed. Serverless functions (AWS Lambda, Vercel Functions, Cloudflare Workers) execute code on demand and bill per invocation and execution time, with nothing running around the clock to manage. Containers (Docker on ECS, Kubernetes, Railway, Render) package application code with its runtime and run as processes that stay on continuously or scale automatically. Bare metal or VPS hosting runs application code on dedicated or virtual machines where the team manages the operating system and runtime environment.
Security, Auth, and ComplianceServer Side Request Forgery: The Quiet Killer in SaaS Integrations
Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF) is a vulnerability where an attacker can cause the server to make HTTP requests to a destination the attacker controls, which may include internal network resources, cloud provider metadata services, or other backend infrastructure not accessible from the public internet. SSRF is particularly dangerous in SaaS products that accept URLs provided by users (webhook endpoints, image imports, integration callbacks, RSS feed fetchers) because the server's network position grants access to resources the attacker cannot reach directly.
Performance OptimizationServer Rendering vs Client Rendering vs Static: The 2026 Map
Web rendering strategies describe where and when HTML is generated for a web page. Server side rendering (SSR) generates HTML on the server for each request, providing fresh data and good SEO at the cost of server compute. Client side rendering (CSR) sends a minimal HTML shell and renders the page in the browser using JavaScript, enabling rich interactivity at the cost of initial load performance. Static site generation (SSG) pre renders HTML at build time, enabling fast delivery from CDN with no server compute per request but requiring a rebuild for content changes. Modern frameworks combine these strategies on a per page or per component basis.
Web App and Frontend DevelopmentServer Components in Practice: A Founder Engineer Story
React Server Components (RSC) are a component model introduced in React 18 and adopted by Next.js 13+ via the App Router that allows components to run on the server, access resources on the server (databases, file system, environment variables) directly, and render HTML without sending the component code to the browser. Server components coexist with client components (which run in the browser and handle interactivity) in the same component tree. The distinction fundamentally changes how data fetching is structured in React applications.
Backend, APIs, and System DesignServer Actions, Edge Functions, and the Modern Backend Surface
The modern backend surface for web applications encompasses multiple execution environments: traditional API servers (Node.js, Python, Go running on centralized servers), edge functions (short lived JavaScript functions running close to the user on distributed edge networks), and server actions (server functions specific to Next.js, called directly from client components without an explicit API route). Each environment has different latency characteristics, available APIs, and appropriate use cases. The choice between them affects performance, development model, and infrastructure cost.
Comparisons and Vendor DecisionsSentry vs Datadog vs New Relic for Errors and Performance
Error tracking and application performance monitoring (APM) tools capture runtime errors, performance traces, and infrastructure metrics from production applications. Sentry is focused on application error tracking and performance monitoring for web and mobile applications. Datadog is a full observability platform covering infrastructure metrics, APM traces, log management, and more. New Relic is a similar full stack observability platform with APM, infrastructure monitoring, and distributed tracing. The tools overlap but differ in focus, pricing model, and the complexity of the observability problems they are designed to solve.