Writing
Engineering and delivery notes, written by the people doing the work.
For most catalogues under a few million rows, GIN-indexed tsvector columns get you 90% of the value of a dedicated search cluster with none of the operational overhead.
The usual objection is "it is overkill for a small app." The counterargument is that the app rarely stays small, and untangling Eloquent from controllers later is more expensive than starting clean.
A slow network plus an impatient double-click is enough to create duplicate leads, duplicate emails, and a confused sales team. The fix is one HTTP header.
It catches the unsophisticated bulk of form spam for near-zero cost, and it is not mutually exclusive with a proper challenge-response check.
Time-based cache expiry is a guess. Tag-based invalidation tied to model observers is not — the cache clears exactly when the underlying data actually changes.
Not "is the code pretty." Test coverage on the payment path, dependency freshness, and whether the team can explain their own architecture decisions.
Client Components are the exception, not the default. Every interactive island should be a deliberate decision, not a copy-pasted "use client" at the top of the file.
Not a finished architecture diagram. An honest list of what is fragile, what is fine, and what to fix first.
A consistent error shape across every endpoint means the frontend writes one error handler instead of parsing bespoke error formats per route.
