THE JOURNAL
Notes on building, shipping & securing the web.
Performance · 5 min
Web fonts without the performance tax
Brand typography does not have to cost you LCP or layout stability. How we choose, subset, load and fall back on web fonts.
Nadia Haddad · Feb 17, 2026
Engineering · 5 min
Multi-tenancy for SaaS: shared schema or database per tenant
How you separate customer data shapes security, cost and every migration you will ever run. The trade-offs between shared and isolated tenancy models.
Maya Okafor · Feb 13, 2026
Security · 5 min
Uptime monitoring that catches real problems without alert fatigue
A monitor that pages you for every blip gets muted within a month. How we choose checks, thresholds and escalation paths that stay trusted.
Leo Tanaka · Feb 10, 2026
Design · 5 min
Designing web forms that people actually finish
Forms are where intent turns into action, and where much of it is lost. Practical patterns for fewer fields, clearer labels and kinder error handling.
Nadia Haddad · Jan 21, 2026
Shopify · 5 min
Building a custom Shopify app: scopes, webhooks and rate limits done right
The engineering decisions that separate a reliable private Shopify app from one that quietly drops orders at peak.
Sofia Lindqvist · Jan 20, 2026
WordPress · 5 min
Speeding up a slow WordPress site without a rebuild
A step-by-step approach to diagnosing and fixing WordPress performance, from hosting and caching to plugins, images and Core Web Vitals.
Ravi Iyer · Jan 20, 2026
DevOps · 5 min
SLO-based alerting that does not burn out a small on-call team
Paging on every CPU spike wears people down and hides real incidents. How we define service level objectives and alert only when users are actually affected.
Leo Tanaka · Jan 15, 2026
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
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
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
One email a month. Only the good stuff.
Field notes from real client projects. No spam.