Digital Insights
Explore our latest articles, guides, and thoughts on digital strategy, design, and development.
SEO
PowerShell
Postmortem
DigiScalability
A 200 OK is not a health check: my llm.txt was base64 for months
Every AI crawler my robots.txt invited was being served an unreadable blob. It returned 200. It had the right content-type. It was gibberish, and I found it by accident.
August 10, 2026
Performance
Serverless
Debugging
Insta Services
It was never the database: proving 11-second latency was cold starts
Response times swung between 0.3 and 11.5 seconds on serverless Postgres. Every instinct said query tuning. The proof came from timing an endpoint that never touches SQL.
August 3, 2026
API Design
Error Handling
Android
Insta Services
Returning an empty list on failure is a lie your users will believe
A database outage rendered in the app as 'No providers near you' — at HTTP 200, with nothing to alert on. The fix needed zero client changes, because of how the parser fails.
August 3, 2026
WebGL
Three.js
Mobile
Life Island
Without preventDefault(), a lost WebGL context can never come back
The bug report was 'random black flashes on mobile'. It was a GPU context loss the page could never recover from — hiding under a HUD that kept painting perfectly.
July 31, 2026
Firebase
Realtime Database
Debugging
Life Island
Your Firebase read rule belongs on the node you listen to, not the node you read
Chat messages were writing successfully and no client on Earth could see them. The rule was on the message; onChildAdded listens on the list.
July 26, 2026
Firebase
Firestore
Debugging
Bano's Cookbook
Firestore's orderBy doesn't sort your data — it silently deletes some of it
Adding orderBy('createdAt') to a collection containing documents written before that field existed made every one of those documents disappear from the results. Status 200. No error. Just fewer recipes.
May 24, 2026
Proven Results
A snapshot of the outcomes we build toward: faster response times, fewer manual handoffs, cleaner systems, and better visibility across the business.
RankPilot — an AI SEO platform, built and run end to end
A Next.js and Firebase platform that audits a site with real crawls and Gemini analysis, and labels every result with how it was produced — measured, estimated, or simulated — so you can tell an actual measurement from a model's guess.
Result:
~184,000 lines of TypeScript; 95 pages, 106 API routes, 19 Cloud Functions
Client Feedback
Practical feedback from teams using the systems, workflows, and digital products we help design and deliver.
Client feedback is being prepared.