Taqnihub / Studio DispatchEst. 2024 · Cairo

Studio Dispatch

A monthly letter from a small software studio — on Go, web engineering, open source, and what it's actually like to run this thing.

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No sequences, no "limited offers", no "what's new at Taqnihub" round-ups. One considered letter a month, sent the third Sunday. You can reply and it'll go to a real person.

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The boring deploy pipeline

Why our deploys still look like a shell script, a Caddy server, and a strict changelog — and why we keep recommending it to clients.

Most of what you read about deployment in 2026 is about platforms — someone else's opinions, someone else's dashboards, someone else's bill.

This month's letter is a field note from the other direction: we shipped a client migration last week with a 40-line shell script, a single systemd unit, and a three-column CHANGELOG. It was the calmest go-live we've had in eighteen months.

Back issues

2026
3 issues
No. 17
Writing for people who already know things
Most technical writing explains. The best technical writing trusts. A short argument for treating your readers like adults.
writingstudio
Mar 15, 20266 min
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No. 16
Row-level security is a feature, not a pattern
A reread of Postgres RLS after three rollouts. What we kept, what we threw out, and the one default we think is indefensible.
postgres
Feb 20, 202611 min
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No. 15
The January letter — goals, books, and one firing
Our usual annual check-in. Also the first letter where we talk openly about a client relationship that didn't work out.
studio
Jan 18, 20267 min
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2025
12 issues
No. 14
A year of go-pipeline in production
Six months after v2, numbers from four client deployments: p99 latency, restart cost, and the one bug that almost made us rewrite it.
goopen-source
Dec 14, 202514 min
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No. 13
Against the frontend monorepo
The case against top-down unification in small product teams, with specific attention to the failure mode everyone has but nobody writes about.
architecture
Nov 16, 20259 min
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No. 12
Reading the Go runtime on a plane
We spent a week with no internet and the runtime source. A short report on what we learned, and why we're recommending you try it.
gowriting
Oct 19, 202510 min
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No. 11
How we price discovery
A rare money letter. Our full discovery-phase pricing structure, why it works, and the two kinds of clients it selects out.
studio
Sep 21, 20255 min
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No. 10
Issue 10 — Ten letters in, what we've learned
A retrospective. Which letters got replies, which ones landed, and the one we almost unsent.
studio
Aug 17, 20256 min
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No. 09
The cost of one extra dependency
A tour of a single go.mod file, from 40 direct deps down to 14, with before/after binary sizes and build times.
go
Jul 20, 20258 min
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No. 08
Interviewing for taste
Technical screens filter for craft. The thing that separates senior engineers is taste — and you can interview for it, carefully.
teamstudio
Jun 15, 20257 min
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No. 07
Why we bill for discovery
Free discovery calls feel generous. They mostly select for clients who don't value the work. The framing we use instead.
studio
May 18, 20256 min
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No. 06
A small studio's guide to invoicing abroad
Cairo to London, Cairo to San Francisco. What actually worked for us: currency, banking, contracts, tax. Not advice — a log.
studio
Apr 13, 20259 min
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No. 05
The case for vertical slices in small teams
Layered architectures feel tidy on paper. In a four-person team shipping weekly, they mostly generate meetings.
architecture
Mar 16, 20259 min
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No. 04
Resilient CLIs — a longer essay
The piece that eventually became the April 2026 blog post, but messier. If you liked the polished version, this is the director's cut.
gowriting
Feb 16, 202516 min
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No. 03
Two years in, what we stopped doing
Our second January letter. An honest list of practices we tried, liked on paper, and quietly abandoned in 2024.
studio
Jan 19, 20257 min
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2024
2 issues
No. 02
Winter reading, ranked
Eight books, two papers, and one long-form essay that changed how we think about software this year.
writing
Dec 15, 20245 min
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No. 01
Issue 1 — Hello from Cairo
What this letter is, what it isn't, and why we're starting it. A short, honest introduction.
studio
Nov 17, 20244 min
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What's in the letter

Three things every issue, and nothing else.

01 essay

One long-ish argument. Never under a thousand words, rarely over three. The kind of piece we'd want to read ourselves on a Sunday.

02 log

What we shipped, what we broke, what we're rewriting. Numbers when we have them. Quiet when we don't.

03 shelf

Two or three links — a book, a paper, a blog post. No "top 10". No affiliate codes. Just things we'd recommend to a friend.