THE JOURNAL
Notes on building, shipping & securing the web.
SEO · 5 min
Faceted navigation SEO for growing e-commerce catalogs
Filters help shoppers and can quietly generate millions of crawlable URLs. How we decide which facets to index and how to control the rest.
Sofia Lindqvist · Jan 13, 2026
Security · 5 min
Secrets management for small web teams
API keys in repositories and passwords in chat threads are how many breaches start. A lightweight approach that fits a team of five.
Leo Tanaka · Dec 16, 2025
E-commerce · 5 min
What it really takes to build a multi-vendor marketplace
Marketplaces look like stores with more sellers. In practice they are two-sided products with payments, trust and operations problems a store never has.
Arjun Mehta · Dec 16, 2025
Engineering · 5 min
Background jobs and queues that survive failure
Queues move slow work out of the request, but they also move failures somewhere harder to see. The patterns we use so jobs retry safely and nothing gets lost.
Maya Okafor · Dec 12, 2025
AI · 5 min
Voice agents on the phone line: latency, handoffs and honesty
What it takes to put an AI voice agent on a real phone line, from sub-second response times to clean transfers and clear disclosure.
Daniel Reyes · Dec 09, 2025
Performance · 5 min
Caching HTML at the edge without serving stale carts
Full-page caching at the CDN can cut server response times dramatically. How to do it without leaking personal data or breaking carts.
Leo Tanaka · Dec 02, 2025
Design · 5 min
Wireframe, clickable prototype or coded prototype
Prototype fidelity should match the question you are trying to answer. A guide to choosing the cheapest artifact that will actually settle the decision.
Nadia Haddad · Nov 19, 2025
SEO · 5 min
Fixing Interaction to Next Paint on content-heavy sites
INP is the Core Web Vital most sites now fail. Where the slow interactions usually come from and the fixes that move field data.
Ravi Iyer · Nov 18, 2025
DevOps · 5 min
Backups you have actually restored: running a quarterly drill
A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a plan. The quarterly drill we run for clients, what it measures, and what it usually uncovers.
Leo Tanaka · Nov 13, 2025
Shopify · 5 min
Metafields and metaobjects as a product content model
Stop hard-coding product details into descriptions. How we model structured content in Shopify so it scales across templates and markets.
Sofia Lindqvist · Nov 04, 2025
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