Insights
Thinking about products, systems, and the decisions between them.
Notes from Broaden on software architecture, product design, real-time systems, AI, engineering, performance, and building digital products that can keep changing.
6 notes
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Architecture decisions your users eventually feel
Database boundaries and caching strategy sound like implementation details until they become loading states and support tickets.
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Real-time UX is a state-management problem before it's a networking problem
Opening the socket takes an afternoon. Deciding what the screen means when messages arrive out of order takes the rest of the project.
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Your design system is missing the states that matter
Most systems document the button. Very few document the button at 3am with a failed request behind it.
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When not to rewrite a legacy application
A rewrite is the most expensive available method for discovering what your current system actually does.
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AI features need failure design
A feature that is right 95% of the time is a feature that is wrong in front of a user roughly once a day.
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The cost of making every feature a special case
Each exception is reasonable on the day it is added. The tenth one is why the product takes a quarter to change.