the-journal

Field notes from actually shipping

No recycled listicles. Everything here comes from client work we shipped, measured, and occasionally broke — written by the people who did it.

Engineering
Sep 18, 20268 min

Next.js 16 in production: what we learned shipping 12 apps

Turbopack is no longer optional, cache components change how you think about data, and partial prerendering quietly became the default. Our field notes from twelve production upgrades.

Abdenassar Amimi

Founder & Lead Engineer

Design Systems
Aug 5, 20267 min

Design tokens: the contract between design and code

Most token systems fail silently — a Figma variable nobody renames, a hex value pasted into a component at 11pm. Here is the token architecture we use to keep design and code honest.

Sarah Chen

Head of Design

Product
Jul 12, 20269 min

From MVP to v1: scoping your first 90 days

The MVP trap is real: products that launch as prototypes and stay that way. A field-tested framework for deciding what the first 90 days after launch should actually contain.

Abdenassar Amimi

Founder & Lead Engineer

AI
Jun 20, 20268 min

AI features users actually pay for (and the ones they do not)

After building AI features into a dozen products, a clear pattern emerged: users pay for AI that finishes a task they already had, not AI that starts a conversation they did not.

Emily Watson

AI/ML Engineer

Engineering
May 14, 20266 min

The performance budget every web app needs (and how to enforce it)

Performance is not a launch task — it is a budget line. The exact budgets we set on every client project, the tooling that enforces them in CI, and the exceptions policy that keeps it honest.

Abdenassar Amimi

Founder & Lead Engineer

Engineering
Apr 8, 20267 min

React Native or Flutter? A decision framework, not a flame war

Both frameworks build great apps — which is right for your product depends on five decisions most teams never make explicitly. The framework we use with clients, including when the answer is "neither".

Michael Torres

Mobile Lead