Sami Ullah
Swat, PK

Writing

Notes from building.

Essays on the actual work of full-stack development — the trade-offs, the unglamorous details, and the lessons that only show up after you ship.

Frontend·12 min read

Building fast Next.js interfaces: lessons from three years of shipping

Speed isn't a setting you switch on at the end. Here's how I think about performance from the first component — hydration, images, fonts, and the traps that quietly make React apps feel slow.

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Backend·11 min read

How I structure a Python data pipeline that won't fall over

Most pipelines don't fail because the transform was wrong — they fail because nobody could tell where it went wrong. A practical structure for ingest, transform and load that survives contact with messy data.

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Architecture·10 min read

React or Django? Choosing a stack for a new product

The framework debate usually asks the wrong question. What actually decides a stack is your team, your content, and how much of your product is an interface versus a system. A decision framework I use.

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Leadership·10 min read

What a CTO actually does at an early-stage startup

The title sounds like strategy and whiteboards. In practice, being CTO of a small team is mostly about protecting focus, choosing boring technology, and writing the code nobody else wants to. What I learned leading engineering at AI3.

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Performance·9 min read

Practical performance budgets for web apps

A performance budget turns "the site feels slow" into a number you can defend. How to set one that your team will actually respect, and how to keep it from rotting the moment the deadline pressure arrives.

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Career·11 min read

From frontend to full-stack: the path that actually worked

Going full-stack isn't about learning every technology — it's about learning to reason across the boundary between the interface and the system. The order I'd learn things in if I were starting again.

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