Notes from the engineering bench.
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Blog posts — page 2
Vector database showdown 2026: Pinecone vs Weaviate vs pgvector vs Qdrant
Four vector databases, four different sweet spots. Here is how our team picks between Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, and Qdrant — with the pricing, latency, and filtering tradeoffs that matter in production.
Zero-downtime deploys for Node.js: blue-green, canaries, and cluster mode
Zero-downtime deploys are a solved problem — as long as the app handles SIGTERM correctly, health checks are honest, and somebody thought about in-flight requests. Here are the three patterns that cover most Node.js production workloads.
MongoDB vs PostgreSQL for SaaS: a 2026 decision framework
The database-choice argument has calmed down since 2020. PostgreSQL covers more workloads than MongoDB ever did, and MongoDB still wins in specific, well-defined cases. Here is the 2026 decision framework — when each one earns its slot, and the scaling myth that still sends teams down the wrong path.
Building a design system with Tailwind and Headless UI (2026 edition)
A working design system in 2026 is thinner than it used to be. Tailwind v4 handles tokens, headless primitives handle behaviour, and your job is the last 20% — the variant API, the theming model, and the accessibility defaults. Here's how to build one that actually scales past the first product team.
Search and matching algorithms for marketplaces: ranking, filtering, personalization
Marketplace search is not e-commerce search with a coat of paint. The candidate pool is two-sided, supply is perishable, and every ranked list has to balance relevance against liquidity. Here is the playbook production teams actually ship.
AI agents in production: the architectural patterns that survived 2025
The 2024–2025 agent hype cycle shipped a lot of demos and very few production systems. Here are the architectural patterns that actually survived — and the failure modes that killed the rest.
Building production RAG systems in 2026: vector DBs, hybrid search, and eval frameworks
Vector DBs, embedding models, hybrid search, rerankers, and evals — the production RAG stack the team actually ships in 2026, with the numbers and pitfalls that shape the decision.
State management in 2026: Zustand, Jotai, Redux Toolkit, or just Context?
Four viable picks, one decision to make per codebase. Here's how the Vertex Stack team chooses between Zustand, Jotai, Redux Toolkit, and plain React Context in 2026 — with a mini-feature built in each so the tradeoffs stop being theoretical.
AI observability: logging, tracing, and evals for LLM apps
Production LLM apps fail silently. Here is how our team wires up traces, evals, cost tracking, and drift detection with the tools that actually earned their place in 2026.
Building a SaaS admin portal that doesn't embarrass you
Every SaaS needs an admin portal by the time support has real customers. Most are stitched together from Retool screens and raw SQL, and most leak. Here's the pattern for a support-grade back office with safe impersonation, tight permission boundaries, and an audit trail you can actually hand to an auditor.