Engineering notes · Nairobi

Ship the app. Keep the platform out of your way.

Short, practical writing about builds, databases, certificates and the unglamorous parts of running software in production.

By Shika Cloud Engineering Updated October 2026 5 min reads

Your app needs a real runtime, not a folder on someone else’s server.

Shared hosting was designed for files. Applications need processes, queues, a database and a build step that runs the same way every time.

Three notes from the platform team

Logins, REST API calls, cron and plugin traffic are normal. A useful security layer has to know the difference between those and a scanner.

A built site can be faster, cheaper and safer than a server-rendered one. The trick is knowing which parts actually need a request.

If the build is slow, flaky or opaque, the deploy experience is slow, flaky and opaque. Treat the pipeline as a feature.