Vol. 3, No. 8 — February 2026

The best code ships from people with stories worth reading

A weekly newsletter for engineers who read the commit message, not just the diff. Long-form interviews. Shipping teardowns. Profile pieces on the developers building the apps in your pocket.

Trusted by 12,400 engineers · 58% average open rate · Every Thursday

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Inside Every Issue
01 / 05Featured Interview

This Week

Marcus Chen

Staff iOS Engineer, Figma · 11 years building for Apple silicon

"I rewrote our entire rendering pipeline in Metal the week before WWDC. Not because it needed it — because I needed to know if I still could. That's how you find out what you actually understand versus what you've just memorized."

  • The UIKit vs SwiftUI decision Figma made in 2023
  • What a rendering bug taught him about team trust
  • Why he turned down a principal role at Apple
02 / 05By The Numbers

Metrics that matter to the engineers who measure everything.

58%

Average open rate

Industry avg: 21%

12.4k

Subscribers

Grown organically — no paid ads

3yrs

Published weekly

Never missed a Thursday

Open rate measured across last 12 issues. Tracked via Buttondown analytics, February 2026.

03 / 05Shipping Teardown

"We fixed a scroll bug that cost us 4-star reviews for two years."

— Priya Nair, Lead iOS Engineer, Notion

// Before: synchronous layout pass // causing 120ms jank on scroll func tableView( _ tableView: UITableView, heightForRowAt indexPath: IndexPath ) -> CGFloat { return calculateDynamicHeight(for: indexPath) // ↑ hitting Core Data on main thread } // After: pre-computed in background // 0ms jank. 60fps. Shipped in one PR. private var heightCache: [IndexPath: CGFloat] = [:]

The fix took 40 minutes. Figuring out that we were the problem — that took 18 months of blaming the users. Every teardown in Dispatch includes the technical change and the human reasoning that almost prevented it.

Issue #31UITableView · Performance · Perception
04 / 05From The Margins

What engineers write in the margins.

I read it on the train to work. By the time I arrive I've already thought of three things I want to change about how my team ships.

Tariq Osei · Engineering Manager

Shopify, Toronto

The interview with the developer who got rejected from the App Store three times and shipped anyway — I sent it to my entire team. Required reading.

Saoirse Brennan · Senior Android Engineer

Stripe, Dublin

Finally a newsletter that doesn't explain what UIKit is. It trusts that I know things. That alone is worth the subscription.

Daisuke Yamamoto · Indie Developer

Kyoto — 2 apps, 180k downloads

05 / 05

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