From the team
What we're
thinking about.
Writing on product decisions, engineering tradeoffs, design thinking, and building software people actually want to use.
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Product
Why we built our own Matrix client instead of forking an existing one
12 March 20258 min readJamie Lee
Most Matrix clients optimise for feature count. We optimised for the feeling of sending a message to someone you trust. Here's what that actually means in practice — the decisions it forced us to make, and the ones we're still unsure about.
JL
Jamie Lee
Mobile · Open source
engineering
The surprising performance cost of always-on hardware polling
We assumed reading sensor data frequently was cheap. We were wrong. Here's what we found when we profiled the hardware info tool on Linux.
28 Feb 2025 · 5 min · Alex Kim
design
Why the student app doesn't have a dark mode (yet)
It's not that we're against dark mode. It's that we haven't found a version that feels right for the warm, approachable tone we're going for. Here's the problem.
14 Feb 2025 · 4 min · Sofia Chen
product
Pricing the inventory manager: what we tried, what failed, what stuck
We shipped with usage-based pricing. Then seat-based. Then a hybrid. Each time we learned something new about how customers thought about value. Here's the full story.
3 Feb 2025 · 6 min · Marcus Rivera
open source
Running an open-source project without burning out
The Matrix client has over 400 GitHub stars and a growing contributor community. Managing that alongside a small paid team is something we're still figuring out. Some honest notes.
22 Jan 2025 · 7 min · Jamie Lee
engineering
How we got our text editor startup time under 40ms
The original prototype took 400ms to open. We cared about that number. Here's the sequence of profiling, lazy loading, and platform-specific tricks that got us to 38ms.
9 Jan 2025 · 9 min · Alex Kim
product
Building products for students is harder than it looks
Students are a demanding audience. They have low tolerance for bad UX, high sensitivity to price, and wildly different workflows by subject. What we learned building the student app.
18 Dec 2024 · 5 min · Marcus Rivera