Engineering deep-dives, AI field notes, product design essays, and transparent company updates — written by the people doing the work.
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8 articles
April 30, 2026
Using AI to Decide Which Feature Flags to Retire
Feature flags accumulate like technical debt — silently. We trained a lightweight model on our analytics stream to surface stale flags before they become production landmines. The approach is language-agnostic and takes a single afternoon to wire up.
April 14, 2026
Dark-First Design Systems: Tokens, Contrast, and the Edge Cases Nobody Talks About
Building a design system with dark mode as the primary canvas — not an afterthought — changes almost every decision. We share our token architecture, the WCAG pitfalls we hit in dark palettes, and why "light mode inversion" always fails the accessibility audit.
March 28, 2026
OAF Programmer 2025: The Year We Doubled Our Team and Halved Our Delivery Time
A transparent look at our most ambitious year yet — 18 shipped products, 3 new service lines, and the internal processes we rewired to make it happen. We also share what failed, what we'd change, and where we're heading in 2026.
March 10, 2026
Stop Putting Everything in Redux — A Practical React Query + Zustand Architecture
Server state and client state are fundamentally different beasts. This tutorial walks through a scalable architecture that keeps React Query in charge of all async data and Zustand for just the UI state your server will never care about.
February 19, 2026
Six Months Running RAG in Production: The Parts the Papers Don't Mention
Retrieval-Augmented Generation looks elegant in demos. Running it for real clients with messy PDFs, multilingual queries, and SLA requirements is another story. We document the chunking strategies, embedding model choices, and reranking tricks that actually moved the needle.
February 3, 2026
Micro-Frontend Tradeoffs: An Honest Scorecard After Three Large-Scale Projects
We've shipped micro-frontends with Module Federation, single-spa, and iframe-based sandboxing on three enterprise projects. This is our honest scorecard — not a vendor pitch — covering DX, runtime performance, team autonomy, and the moments where a well-organized monolith wins.
January 22, 2026
Motion Design as a Conversion Tool: Data From 14 A/B Tests
We ran fourteen A/B tests across client sites, isolating entrance animations, hover micro-interactions, and page transitions. The results were nuanced: some animations lifted conversion by 18%; others hurt it badly. Here's the full breakdown and the heuristics we distilled.
January 8, 2026
Migrating a Large React App to Vite 6 + Tailwind v4 — A Step-by-Step Guide
Tailwind v4's new CSS-first config and Vite 6's improved HMR are genuinely exciting upgrades — but the migration path from older stacks is full of subtle breakage. This step-by-step guide covers the plugin changes, the PostCSS gotchas, and the Tailwind utility renames you'll definitely miss.
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