Writing

The Vitalize Blog

Engineering notes from the Vitalize team — architecture, performance, mobile and web development, automation and the decisions behind the products we ship.

Jun 25, 20264 min readF4RAN

Design the Unhappy Path First

Most of us learn to program by making the happy path work. The request comes in, the data is there, the downstream service answers, and we ship it. That instinct is fine for a demo. It is a liability

Read the post

What we write about

Vitalize builds web platforms, iOS and Android apps, automation bots and the backends behind them. These posts are the working notes from that: the decisions, the measurements and the things that turned out to be wrong.

Architecture and trade-offs: Why a system ended up the shape it did — the option we took, the ones we rejected, and what each would have cost later.
Performance in the real world: Cold starts, render paths, database round trips, and the difference between a page that measures fast and one that feels fast.
Mobile and web engineering: React, Next.js and React Native in production: releases, native limits, and the details that only show up on a real device.
Automation and backend work: Go and Postgres services, scrapers and bots — building things that run unattended and fail in ways you can see.

If you would rather see the finished work, the projects are here, and you can tell us what you want built. The posts are also available as an RSS feed.