RE09 Where early adopters ship ideas first.

RE09

Where early adopters ship ideas first.

Latest Articles

SQLite Walked So Your Cloud Database Could Run — Now It's Taking the Throne
Engineering Culture

SQLite Walked So Your Cloud Database Could Run — Now It's Taking the Throne

SQLite was supposed to be the training wheels of databases — something you use before you graduate to the real stuff. But a growing wave of developers is shipping SQLite straight to production, and the benchmarks are making a lot of people rethink what 'real' even means.

Postgres Is Still Winning, and Most Developers Are Just Fine With That
Engineering Culture

Postgres Is Still Winning, and Most Developers Are Just Fine With That

A quiet rebellion is happening in database selection meetings across the country. Experienced engineers are skipping the shiny new data stores and reaching straight for PostgreSQL, SQLite, and other tools that have been around longer than most of their junior teammates. Turns out, boring is a feature.

Who Pays for the Code the Internet Runs On?
Engineering Culture

Who Pays for the Code the Internet Runs On?

Open-source maintainers keep critical infrastructure alive while many of the companies profiting from it contribute nothing back. That arrangement is cracking, and the models replacing it are more varied — and more interesting — than most people realize.

Back to One: The Engineers Tearing Out Their Microservices and Sleeping Again
Engineering Culture

Back to One: The Engineers Tearing Out Their Microservices and Sleeping Again

A quiet rebellion is reshaping how serious engineering teams think about architecture. Developers at startups and scale-ups across the US are ripping out their distributed systems and discovering something wild: a single, well-organized codebase ships faster, breaks less, and is way easier to reason about. Here's why the monolith is making a comeback nobody wants to admit they needed.

Read the Logs: How Developers Are Ditching Observability Sprawl and Just Thinking Again
AI & Machine Learning

Read the Logs: How Developers Are Ditching Observability Sprawl and Just Thinking Again

Distributed tracing dashboards, service maps, and telemetry pipelines have become their own category of complexity — and some developers are done with it. A growing group of early adopters is designing systems that are understandable without external infrastructure, using structured logs, deterministic execution, and synchronous-first thinking. Turns out, when your code is easy to reason about, you don't need a $30k/month observability vendor to tell you what it's doing.

Your App Shouldn't Need Wi-Fi to Work: The Case for Local-First Development
AI & Machine Learning

Your App Shouldn't Need Wi-Fi to Work: The Case for Local-First Development

A quiet but serious movement is pushing back against cloud-dependent software by putting data, logic, and control back on the user's own device. Local-first development isn't just a technical philosophy — it's a direct challenge to the SaaS model that's defined the last decade of software. Early adopters are already building in this space, and the tools are finally catching up.

Microservices Hangover: How Developers Are Getting Sober on Simplicity
Engineering Culture

Microservices Hangover: How Developers Are Getting Sober on Simplicity

The microservices gold rush convinced a generation of developers that distributed systems were always the answer. Now, a growing number of smart teams are quietly tearing it all down and rebuilding something that actually works — a well-designed monolith. Here's why the pendulum is swinging back.

Ship It Ugly: The Case for Launching Before You're Ready
Engineering Culture

Ship It Ugly: The Case for Launching Before You're Ready

The most successful early adopters didn't wait until everything was polished — they shipped rough, learned fast, and iterated harder. Here's why getting something broken in front of real users beats six months of whiteboard planning every single time.

Going Lean: Why Some Developers Are Ditching the Framework Stack Entirely
AI & Machine Learning

Going Lean: Why Some Developers Are Ditching the Framework Stack Entirely

A quiet rebellion is underway in the dev community. More builders are stripping out heavy frameworks and bloated dependency chains in favor of lightweight, purpose-built tools — and the performance gains are hard to argue with. But is this a genuine shift in how we build software, or just the latest flavor of developer contrarianism?

Why the Fastest Builders Write Less Code, Delete More, and Refuse to Refactor
Engineering Culture

Why the Fastest Builders Write Less Code, Delete More, and Refuse to Refactor

The conventional wisdom about clean code, best practices, and avoiding technical debt is quietly killing your velocity. A growing number of early-stage developers are discovering that the path to a shipped MVP isn't better architecture — it's strategic constraint, deliberate messiness, and knowing exactly when to throw code in the trash. Here's the uncomfortable truth about how the fastest teams actually build.

Forget the API Bill: How Developers Are Building Smarter With Open-Source AI
AI & Machine Learning

Forget the API Bill: How Developers Are Building Smarter With Open-Source AI

A growing wave of developers and early-stage startups are ditching closed-model APIs in favor of open-source LLMs like Llama 2 and Mistral — and they're shipping faster for it. Between slashed infrastructure costs, full data control, and a rapidly maturing ecosystem of self-hosting tools, the case for going open-source first has never been stronger. We talked to founders who made the switch and never looked back.