Engineering Insights

There are around 10 independent PDF engines, and I built a new one from scratch.

I'm a student who mostly built little apps for myself. About 14 months ago I needed to edit a random PDF and couldn't find a good web tool that actually edits them. It made me wonder: billions of people use PDFs for work, school, and legal documents, so why can almost no web service truly edit them? So I tried to build one, and failed. I didn't understand why it was so hard. I tried combining pdf.js and jsPDF but kept hitting walls. Then it clicked: most JavaScript PDF libraries only do two thin

JavaScript Atomics and SharedArrayBuffer in 2026: Practical Patterns for Cross-Worker State

JavaScript Atomics and SharedArrayBuffer in 2026: Practical Patterns for Cross-Worker State This article was written with the assistance of AI, under human supervision and review. Most cross-worker communication problems stem from treating workers as isolated processes when the workload demands shared state. Teams reach for postMessage by default, serialize multi-megabyte data structures on every frame, and watch their real-time audio pipelines stutter under 100ms message latency. The browser

I Built a Browser to Solve a Problem Every Developer and QA Engineer Faces

If you've ever worked on an application with multiple user roles, you've probably experienced this. You log in as an Administrator. Then you need to test the Manager. So you log out. Log in as the Customer. Log out again. Then the Support Agent. And maybe another Guest account. Before long, your browser has turned into a collection of Incognito windows, multiple browser profiles, different browsers, or entirely different devices. I reached a point where I was testing an application with five dif

Best alternatives to Heroku in 2026

Heroku pioneered the shape of what a small team expects from a hosting platform. Push code to Git, get a running app, add a Postgres or a Redis with one command, worry about the product rather than the infrastructure. That shape has since become the industry default, but the platform that invented it has been steadily losing teams since the 2022 when the free-tier was removed, by 2026 much of the ecosystem seems to have moved on. This post walks through several platforms that are worth consideri

I built 42 landing page templates as single HTML files (no npm, no build step)

I got tired of downloading a "simple landing page template" and finding a 400 MB folder with npm, a build step, a config file and three CSS frameworks I never asked for. So we built the opposite: templates that are one single HTML file. All the CSS in a <style> tag, all the JS inline. No frameworks, no CDNs, no build step, no dependencies. You open the file, you edit the text, you upload it anywhere. It works offline. Take it, no signup, no email wall: 👉 Free coming-soon template (live demo + d

Explore the DjangoCon US 2026 Speaker Lineup and Reserve Your Spot

DjangoCon US 2026 is just around the corner, and now is the perfect time to start planning your conference experience. Our speaker lineup is now available, featuring talks from Django contributors, maintainers, educators, and community members covering everything from web development and APIs to deployment, security, testing, AI, and the future of the Django ecosystem. Whether you're attending your first DjangoCon US or returning to reconnect with friends and colleagues, you'll find opportunitie

Building Service Topology at Scale: Architecture, Challenges, and Lessons Learned

Manifest Man

Comments