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.
Query Optimization in PostgreSQL: Real Examples From Real Projects
PostgreSQL query optimization is the process of analyzing slow queries using EXPLAIN ANALYZE output, identifying the root cause (missing index, sequential scan, poor join order, N+1 pattern), and applying targeted fixes that reduce execution time. Optimization in PostgreSQL is driven by evidence: the planner's cost estimates and actual row counts in EXPLAIN output reveal which part of the query is expensive and why.
Comparisons and Vendor DecisionsPylon vs Plain vs Front for Modern Customer Support
Pylon, Plain, and Front are B2B customer support platforms that manage customer communications across channels (email, Slack Connect, Microsoft Teams, in app chat) and provide tooling for support teams to track, route, and resolve issues. Each makes different architectural bets: Pylon is designed specifically for Slack first B2B support workflows, Plain is a developer focused, API first support platform, and Front is a shared inbox platform that handles multiple communication channels including email, social, and messaging.
Cross Platform and Mobile DevelopmentPWA vs Native App: The Decision Every Startup Faces
A progressive web app (PWA) is a web application that uses modern browser APIs to provide capabilities previously available only to native apps: offline functionality, push notifications, home screen installation, and access to some device hardware. A native app is compiled for a specific platform (iOS or Android) and runs on the device's native runtime, with access to the full range of platform APIs. The PWA vs native decision involves tradeoffs between development cost, distribution model, platform capability access, and user experience quality.
Cross Platform and Mobile DevelopmentPush Notifications: The Architecture Most Apps Get Wrong
Push notification architecture encompasses the server side systems that determine when to send notifications, to whom, with what content, and through which delivery channel (FCM for Android, APNs for iOS, web push for PWAs). A well designed push notification system stores user notification preferences, supports targeting by user attributes and behavior, tracks delivery and open rates, and respects do not disturb constraints. A poorly built system sends notifications to all users at the same time regardless of timezone, with the same content regardless of user context, and with no mechanism for users to control what they receive.
AI Integration and Vibe Coding RescuePrompt Versioning: A Discipline Most Teams Skip
Prompt versioning is the practice of treating LLM prompts as versioned artifacts with the same discipline applied to application code: version control, change history, deployment processes, and testing. Unversioned prompts are modified informally, making it impossible to roll back a change that degraded output quality, attribute quality improvements to specific prompt changes, or test prompt modifications against a consistent evaluation set. Prompt versioning is the foundation of a systematic prompt engineering practice.
Performance OptimizationProfiling Production: How to Do It Without Causing Incidents
Production profiling is the collection of detailed performance data from live production services to identify CPU hotspots, memory allocation patterns, and I/O bottlenecks under real production traffic. Unlike staging profiling, production profiling uses actual workload characteristics, data volumes, and user behavior patterns that staging environments cannot accurately replicate. The risk is that profiling overhead can degrade production performance if not done carefully, making sampling and profiling sessions bounded by time essential.
Startup Technical StrategyProfessional Services Engineering: The Discipline Behind Big Contracts
Professional services engineering is the delivery of custom technical work by software companies as a revenue line separate from their software product subscriptions. Enterprise buyers often require custom integrations, data migrations, configuration, and implementation support as a condition of adopting a software product. Professional services revenue comes from these custom delivery engagements. For SaaS companies, professional services can accelerate enterprise deals but creates operational complexity: it requires different staffing, different project management, and different quality standards than product engineering.
Recruiter and Career PositioningPricing Your Engineering Services in 2026
Pricing engineering services is the decision about what to charge clients for software development, technical consulting, code review, architecture design, or other engineering work. The pricing decision involves setting a rate that reflects the value delivered, the market rate for comparable work, the engineer's positioning, and the type of clients the engineer wants to attract. Underpricing attracts clients who prioritize cost, which creates a ceiling on earning potential and often produces lower quality working relationships.
MVP Development and Startup BuildsPre Launch Wait Lists: Do They Work or Are They Theater?
A pre launch waitlist is a mechanism for collecting email addresses or contact information from people who express interest in a product before it is available. Waitlists are used to gauge demand, build an early adopter base, and create launch momentum. Their signal value depends entirely on how they are implemented: a waitlist that requires only an email address proves little; a waitlist paired with a payment commitment, referral completion, or detailed qualification proves more. Most waitlists produce more social proof than demand evidence.
MVP Development and Startup BuildsPre Build Customer Discovery: 10 Questions That Save Months of Work
Pre build customer discovery is the process of conducting structured interviews with potential customers before writing any code, to understand their problems deeply enough to build a product that solves them correctly. The goal is to surface assumptions about customer behavior, willingness to pay, and problem severity that would otherwise be discovered only after months of development. Customer discovery does not validate the product; it validates the problem and the target customer's characteristics before the product is defined.
Comparisons and Vendor DecisionsPostHog vs Mixpanel vs Amplitude in 2026
Product analytics platforms capture user behavior in software products (page views, feature usage, funnel completions, user paths) and provide tools for analyzing that behavior to inform product decisions. PostHog, Mixpanel, and Amplitude are the three platforms most commonly evaluated by SaaS teams. They differ in their data storage model (PostHog is self hostable with full data ownership, Mixpanel and Amplitude are cloud only), their pricing model, their analysis capabilities, and their focus (PostHog includes session replay and feature flags, Amplitude has the most advanced behavioral analytics).
Backend, APIs, and System DesignPostgreSQL vs Supabase vs Neon vs Planetscale
Self managed PostgreSQL on a cloud provider, Supabase, Neon, and PlanetScale represent a spectrum from full operational control to maximum managed convenience for database infrastructure. Each choice involves tradeoffs between engineering time spent on database operations, feature access, pricing structure, and vendor dependency. For most early stage SaaS products, the managed platforms provide enough benefit to justify their cost and feature restrictions. For high scale or compliance sensitive applications, self managed infrastructure provides control that managed platforms cannot.
Backend, APIs, and System DesignPostgreSQL vs MySQL vs MongoDB for a New SaaS in 2026
PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB are the three most commonly evaluated database choices for new SaaS applications. PostgreSQL is a relational database with strong ACID compliance, extensive feature set (JSON columns, full-text search, geometric types, extensions), and broad managed hosting support. MySQL is a relational database with wide compatibility and specific advantages in read-heavy workloads. MongoDB is a document database that stores data as JSON documents without enforcing a schema. Each has appropriate use cases and inappropriate use cases for SaaS applications.
SaaS Architecture and ScalingPostgreSQL Performance at Scale: The Tweaks That Move the Needle
PostgreSQL performance optimization at scale involves identifying the queries and configurations that produce the most user visible latency or throughput limitations, then addressing them with targeted changes to query design, indexing strategy, configuration parameters, or application layer caching. The most impactful changes are almost always specific to the workload: a missing index on a frequently queried column, a sequential scan where an index scan is possible, or a configuration parameter that is tuned for a smaller server than is currently deployed.
DevOps, Deployment, InfrastructurePoint in Time Recovery: A Founder's Insurance Policy
Point in time recovery (PITR) is a database recovery capability that allows restoring the database to any specific moment within a retention window, not just to a predetermined backup snapshot. PITR is implemented by combining regular full or incremental backups with continuous write-ahead log (WAL) archiving. To restore to a specific point, the system replays the WAL from the nearest snapshot up to the target timestamp. PITR is critical for recovering from accidental data deletion or corruption that is discovered hours or days after it occurred.
Comparisons and Vendor DecisionsPlanetScale vs Supabase vs Neon vs Aurora Serverless
PlanetScale, Supabase, Neon, and Aurora Serverless are managed database platforms that eliminate or reduce the operational overhead of running a database server. Each uses a different underlying technology: PlanetScale is MySQL with Vitess and branch based schema deployments; Supabase is Postgres with REST and realtime APIs; Neon is Postgres with serverless connection pooling and branch based development; Aurora Serverless is AWS's autoscaling MySQL or Postgres offering. The right choice depends on the database technology, the connection pattern (serverless functions vs. persistent servers), and the development workflow preferences.
SaaS Architecture and ScalingPlan Upgrades and Downgrades: A Billing Architecture Story
Plan upgrade and downgrade handling is the billing system behavior that determines what happens when a customer changes their subscription plan mid billing period. An upgrade typically grants immediate access to higher tier features with prorated credit for unused time on the old plan. A downgrade may be effective immediately or at the end of the current period depending on the product's policy. The complexity comes from proration calculations, feature gating enforcement at the correct time, and the downstream effects on usage limits, seat counts, and billing cycles.
Comparisons and Vendor DecisionsPipedrive vs HubSpot vs Close for Founder Led Sales
Pipedrive, HubSpot, and Close are customer relationship management (CRM) platforms used by B2B sales teams to manage prospects, track deal progress, log communications, and forecast revenue. For early stage founders doing their own sales, the relevant evaluation criteria are: how fast is the data entry workflow, how good is the email integration, how clear is the pipeline view, and how much setup is required before the tool is useful. Each tool makes different tradeoffs on these dimensions.
Security, Auth, and CompliancePersonally Identifiable Information in Logs: A Cleanup Playbook
PII (personally identifiable information) in application logs refers to personal data about users or customers that is captured in log entries, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses, location data, payment information, and behavioral data that can identify individuals. Logging PII creates compliance obligations under GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy regulations, expands the data subject rights obligations (right to erasure, right of access), and creates security risk if log storage is compromised. Minimizing PII in logs requires auditing existing log content and implementing filtering in the log pipeline.
Performance OptimizationPerformance as a Feature: A Founder's Case
Performance as a feature is the product strategy of treating application speed, responsiveness, and load time as user facing capabilities that are actively maintained, measured, and marketed rather than as background engineering work. The case is made on three dimensions: conversion (slow pages lose more users before they convert), retention (slow interactions reduce session length and return rate), and competitive differentiation (speed is a product quality signal that affects how users evaluate the product relative to alternatives).
Software Costs and BudgetingPer Seat vs Per Usage Pricing: Cost Implications for Buyers
Per seat pricing charges a fixed amount per user who can access the software, regardless of how often they use it or how much work the software does for them. Per usage pricing charges based on measured consumption: API calls, records processed, messages sent, compute time. Each model creates different cost predictability and different scaling characteristics. Per seat pricing is predictable and favors high usage teams; per usage pricing aligns cost with value but produces unpredictable costs at variable workloads.
Software Costs and BudgetingPer Hour vs Per Project: Pricing Models Explained
Per hour pricing for software development charges a fixed rate for each hour of work regardless of output. The client bears the scope and time risk: if requirements change or estimation was wrong, the hours increase and the total cost increases. Per project pricing charges a fixed amount for a defined scope. The developer bears the scope and time risk: if the project takes longer than estimated, the developer absorbs the cost overrun. Each model has appropriate and inappropriate use cases.
Security, Auth, and CompliancePenetration Testing for Startups: Cost, Scope, and Cadence
A penetration test (pentest) is a structured security assessment where security professionals attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in a system using the same techniques an attacker would use, within a defined scope and with explicit authorization. For SaaS startups, penetration tests are typically conducted annually or before significant security certifications (SOC 2, ISO 27001) and provide an attacker's perspective on the application's security posture that automated scanning and code review cannot fully replicate.
Security, Auth, and CompliancePCI DSS for SaaS Touching Payments: Patterns to Avoid the Trap
PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is a set of security requirements for organizations that process, transmit, or store payment card data. Compliance scope is determined by the cardholder data environment (CDE): the systems and people who can access cardholder data. The most effective PCI DSS strategy for SaaS products is reducing the CDE to zero by using payment processor tokenization so that card data never touches the application's infrastructure.