Engineering Notes
Why the engineering decisions were made. The reasoning, the trade-offs, and the failures that taught us each lesson. We collected them over decades in different shapes and forms, starting with Post-It notes and the latest maintained in our own Markdown Notes Manager connected to Github repo.
The Reepolee Approach summarizes the principles. These notes preserve the arguments, tradeoffs, and implementation decisions behind them.
Read Our ApproachYour Agent Will Eat Whatever You Feed It
On why denormalized documentation is a structural bug in agentic workflows, how single-source-of-truth architecture prevents silent drift, and why prompting an agent requires the same precision as briefing a junior developer who arrives with no tribal knowledge and no context.
Internal Teams Decide, Everything Else Just Delivers
On why internal software teams are the deciding factor in whether a business gets the software it actually needs - covering proximity, iteration speed, ROI, and the compounding advantage of people who understand the work.
What Does This Change Affect?
Building in public: why incremental regeneration and request-time caching face the same dependency question, what our publisher already does, and the open problem of proving which pages a change touches.
One Output, or One Per Reader?
Why server rendering earns its place through properties static generation cannot structurally have, why most products are both a site and an app, and how we decide which pages are editions and which are conversations.
On-Request ISR Is SSR With a Cache
Why Reeweb classifies rendering strategies by when rendering happens rather than by what the feature is called, what on-request revalidation actually costs the visitor, and where the industry's counter-argument is genuinely right.
The Tool Is the Verb
On the one idea that shapes our toolchain: the command line is a sentence and the tool is the verb. Why tailwindcss, reettier, conc and bun run as commands with the work as their arguments, the single requirement that makes a tool a command, how a tool earns its promotion into the verb set, and where the on-demand…
The Second Language Test
Why internationalization and localization come before almost everything else: the bakery test of daily life, postal codes that do not forgive, Slovenian plurals with their four forms, and why every app we ship speaks at least four languages.
You're a Developer, Act Like It
On responsible programming, deciding for the long-term survival of the software you write, and why installing a random package from the registry is a decision about trust, not about convenience.
Embrace Your Mentors, in Any Shape or Form
On mentors, what they actually transfer, why consistency needs a frame and standard operating procedures, why the relationship only works when it is mutual, and a plea for both sides - those who can teach and those who can be taught - to keep looking for each other.
My Machine Is Now Your Machine
On deploying personally, why the tested build and the shipped build should be the same artifact, how a temporary tunnel lets QA and clients approve the exact build that goes live, and how the old 'works on my machine' joke reverses when your machine's output becomes production.