Akforges
Engineering blog

Things we learned the hard way.

Technical deep-dives from production. AI hardening, n8n patterns, performance, and the decisions that actually matter at scale.

April 28, 2026

n8n vs Zapier vs Make: Which Automation Tool in 2026?

A direct comparison of n8n, Zapier, and Make across pricing, flexibility, data residency, and scalability. With real numbers from production deployments.

n8nAutomationZapierMake
9 min read
April 22, 2026

React Native vs Native iOS and Android: How We Decide in 2026

React Native has improved significantly. Native still wins for certain use cases. Here's the framework we use to decide — with real trade-offs from production apps.

MobileReact NativeiOSAndroid
8 min read
April 15, 2026

The 12-Item Checklist Before Shipping Your AI Prototype to Production

Most AI prototypes fail in production for the same reasons. Here's the checklist we run on every client LLM system before it touches real users.

AIProductionLLMEngineering
8 min read
April 10, 2026

Core Web Vitals for Next.js App Router: The Complete Fix Guide

LCP, CLS, and INP failing on your Next.js app? This guide covers the exact causes and fixes for each metric, with code examples for App Router.

Next.jsPerformanceSEOCore Web Vitals
12 min read
April 5, 2026

RAG in Production: Patterns That Actually Work at Scale

Naive RAG breaks in production. Here are the architecture patterns we use when building retrieval-augmented generation systems for real users — chunking, reranking, eval harnesses, and cost controls.

AIRAGLLMProduction
11 min read
April 1, 2026

Why We Self-Host n8n on AWS (and the Exact Setup We Use)

n8n Cloud is convenient. Self-hosted n8n on your own VPC is cheaper, more controllable, and GDPR/HIPAA-friendly. Here's the exact architecture we deploy for clients.

n8nAutomationAWSDevOps
10 min read