Checkout Extensibility: Your Orders Still Land, Your Attribution Is Already Dead
Two Shopify deprecations landed this summer and neither one produces an error a customer can see. Checkout keeps taking money; the logic bolted onto checkout stops running. We stopped treating order volume as a health check, and started reconciling counts instead.
Read More
targetSdk 36: The Build Stays Green and the UI Breaks Anyway
The Gradle diff is one line and it compiles first time, which is exactly the problem. Targeting Android 16 turns off your edge-to-edge opt-out, enables predictive back, and makes your portrait lock advisory on any screen 600dp wide — and not one of those three is a build error.
27 Aug 2026 · 10 min read
Agent Sandboxes: The Boundary Is the Credential, Not the Container
Ask a team whether their agent is sandboxed and you'll get the name of a container runtime. That answers a different question. What decides your blast radius is which credentials exist inside the box, which hosts it can reach, and what it's allowed to carry back out.
25 Aug 2026 · 10 min read
MCP Server or Plain Function? The Context Cost Rule
MCP is a distribution protocol, not a capability upgrade. Here's the rule we use to decide whether a tool belongs in an MCP server or stays a plain function in your agent loop — and the context tax nobody budgets for.
24 Aug 2026 · 10 min read
pg-boss vs BullMQ vs Inngest vs Trigger.dev: Pick the Queue by Its Failure Mode
We've shipped background jobs on all four this year. Not once did throughput decide it. What decided it every time was what happens when a worker dies mid-job — who re-runs what, who pays for it, and whether anyone finds out.
23 Aug 2026 · 11 min read
TanStack Start in Production: The Router Is the Framework, and That Changes Your Estimates
TanStack Start has been on its 1.x line since early 2025 and now pulls roughly a third of Next.js's weekly npm traffic. We shipped three client apps on it this year. The reason to pick it isn't speed — it's where your type errors show up, and how early.
22 Aug 2026 · 7 min read
Intercom Fin vs a Self-Hosted RAG Bot: Real Costs
Drift, Intercom Fin, Tidio, Crisp — or a self-hosted RAG build of your own. What each actually costs, resolves, and who it's really for.
15 Aug 2026 · 9 min read
Work With Us
Let’s create
with purpose
Share your goals, timeline, and challenges — we’ll respond with clarity and next steps.
Ambitious ideas deserve thoughtful execution. Start the conversation and let’s define what success looks like.
Team
Acetrum
Est. 2015
4.9/5
Trusted by
top brands
Newsletter
Signals worth
paying attention
No recycled headlines — just the patterns we’re seeing across real client work, distilled into one read a month.
A curated digest of practical thinking and real-world brand perspectives monthly.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.