Q2 2026 Engineering Review: What We Shipped
A transparent quarterly review — what we shipped, what we paused, where the time actually went, and what we are carrying into Q3.
— /journal
Engineering notes & field stories
Production-tested patterns, product stories from Blink AI, Nexia Academy and Wallnetic, and the trade-offs we hit shipping real software. Written by senior engineers, not marketing.
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When to Refactor: A Senior Engineer’s Decision Tree
Three questions decide whether to refactor or ship — and one of them is “is anyone planning to touch this in the next quarter?”. The decision tree we use at T-Square.
in Engineering -
Conversation State in AI Products: Patterns That Survive
Why stateless LLM calls plus structured turn state beat in-prompt history, and the conversation-state patterns we ship in production AI products.
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Building Internal Tools That Don’t Slow You Down
Why we keep internal admin tools intentionally boring, the patterns that age well, and the temptation to over-engineer them that costs every team.
in Engineering -
Why We Run Postgres for Everything: 2026 Update
JSONB, pgvector, full-text search, queues — Postgres covers more of the stack than most teams expect. Where we draw the line and when we reach for a specialized store.
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Migrating an Expo App from Bare React Native: When and How
When to migrate an existing bare React Native app to managed Expo, the prerequisites that catch teams off-guard, and the step-by-step playbook we run on real production apps.
in Engineering -
Wallnetic’s Metal Renderer: How We Draw Live Wallpapers on the Desktop
Why Metal over Core Animation for multi-display live wallpapers, the sandbox-compatible rendering pipeline behind Wallnetic, and the power budget we have to fit inside.
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Multi-Tenant LMS Reporting: Cross-Tenant Aggregation Without Leaks
How we build cross-tenant analytics and per-tenant reporting on the same data layer — with tenant isolation enforced at query time, not by convention.
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How We Validate cmi5 LMS Compatibility Before Shipping
Three LMS vendors claimed cmi5 support; only one shipped a working launch flow. Our pre-flight checklist and the exact tests we run before any cmi5 content reaches a customer LMS.
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Designing an LRS from Scratch: Statement Schemas and Query Patterns We Wish We Had Earlier
The statement schema, query patterns and indexing decisions behind a production xAPI Learning Record Store — and the ones we wish we had made at the start of Nexia Academy.