Notes from the people row.
How we build Avtrz, what we’re shipping, and the small stuff our customers learn about putting real faces on every name in their product.
How we cache 50M profile photos without going broke
S3 was the easy answer. It was also the wrong one. Notes on the boring storage decisions behind a cheap-feeling API.
What we shipped in April
Workspace allow-lists, a dashboard refresh, two fewer modals, and a billing meter you can actually read.
Real photos in your HubSpot contacts in 4 minutes
A click-by-click walkthrough: no SDK, no Zapier flows, no IT ticket. Just a property and an image URL.
Designing people rows that don't feel like a spreadsheet
Avatars are 32 pixels of UX. Notes on cropping, ringing, fallback states, and the eight times you should not show a photo.
The case for one image link, and against another SDK
Every dev tool wants to live in your package.json. Most of them shouldn't. A short defense of doing the simplest thing.
Edge-side image transforms: shaving 200ms off every avatar
How we replaced a Sharp worker pool with edge-rendered crops, and the three production bugs we hit on the way.
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Engineering posts, customer stories, and the occasional changelog. No tracking pixels, no growth-hack subject lines.