Things we've
been thinking
about.
Engineering insights, product lessons, and honest takes from a small team building software for real people.
Featured post
Why we switched from REST to tRPC on every new project
Type-safe APIs across the stack sounded like a luxury. After a year of shipping with tRPC, we can't imagine going back.
The hidden cost of skipping a design system on small projects
It feels fast to skip it early. It doesn't feel fast six months later when three engineers have three different button styles.
React Native in 2026: what's changed and what still hurts
The new architecture is a real improvement. The ecosystem, however, still has rough edges worth knowing about before you start.
Postgres full-text search is good enough (most of the time)
Before you spin up Elasticsearch, read this. For 90% of use cases, what you already have in your database is plenty.
What we learned from our first fixed-price project
Spoiler: scope creep is real. Here's the contract language, planning approach, and communication rhythm that saved us.
How we do design handoffs without Figma Dev Mode
Dev Mode is great when you have it. We've built a lightweight process using HTML prototypes and structured READMEs that works just as well.
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Engineering, product, and business — from the Lemon Drop team.