_1751731246795-BygAaJJK.png){kind=logo}
Engineering & product playbooks
Hands-on playbooks, decision frameworks, and case studies from the team building AI-native products at CodeNicely.
How to Hire a Software Development Partner in India
Three Indian vendors sent you nearly identical proposals. Here is how to tell which one has actually shipped production systems — and which is a body shop with a good deck.
Build vs. Buy AI Credit Scoring: A Lender's Decision Framework
Off-the-shelf AI credit scoring platforms often match custom models on accuracy in year one — but accuracy isn't the axis that should drive your build-vs-buy call. Here's the framework that actually matters, from explainability ownership to alternative-data fit.
Event Sourcing Explained: Stop Losing Your Audit Trail
Failed an audit because your database only stores current state? Here's how event sourcing turns your history into the source of truth — and why the audit log is actually the least interesting part.
Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Legacy Modernization Partner
Every vendor claims legacy modernization experience. These 15 questions expose which ones have actually reverse-engineered a live, undocumented system — and which will discover the difference at your expense.
Supabase vs. Firebase vs. PlanetScale: Pick the Right BaaS
Choosing between Supabase, Firebase, and PlanetScale isn't about features or DX — it's about where your relational complexity will live once multi-tenancy and row-level security show up. Here's how to decide before you re-platform.
Idempotent Webhook Handlers: Stop Processing Events Twice
If your Stripe or Razorpay webhook occasionally double-credits a wallet or creates duplicate orders, the fix isn't deduplicating HTTP requests — it's making the database write itself a no-op on replay. Here's a runnable tutorial that shows how to do it correctly under concurrent retries.
How Vahak Onboarded 800K Trucks Without a Sales Team
Vahak's supply-side unlock wasn't a slicker signup flow — it was rebuilding trust and verification to run asynchronously, so a truck owner could transact before a single document was fully verified. Here's the architectural call and what generalizes.
How to Sunset a Legacy Feature Without Breaking Power Users
Retiring a legacy feature gets ugly when 2% of accounts represent 40% of revenue and have wired the thing into workflows you've never seen. Here's the operator's playbook — sequenced steps, checkpoints, and the failure modes that torpedo most sunset plans.
How to Hire a Software Development Partner in Australia
A practitioner's guide to hiring a software development partner in Australia — the real criteria that separate genuine delivery experience from offshore generalists who added 'Australia' to their website. What to ask, what to verify, and where the price premium is actually justified.
5 Mistakes Teams Make When Digitizing a Paper-Based Supply Chain
Supply chain digitization rarely fails at go-live. It fails in the six weeks after, when the paper shadow system quietly outcompetes the new software. Here are the five mistakes we see teams make — and how to recover before adoption collapses.
What Is a Vector Database? Stop Searching Your Data Like It's 2005
Keyword search breaks the moment users paraphrase, use synonyms, or type in a different language than your docs. A vector database fixes that — but only if you actually need it. Here's how the technology works and when it's overkill.
Webhook vs. Polling: Pick the Right Data Sync Pattern
Most guides frame webhook vs polling as a latency preference. That framing is what causes 3 a.m. incidents. The real question is whether you trust the upstream vendor's delivery guarantee enough to make it your system of record.