Hello and welcome to 2025!

We’re back to our regular schedule after the Christmas break, and I’m excited to share the newest development in tech with you all! Today we’ll explore Canva’s secret for handling 90M queries a month, what AI-assisted coding means for the future of development, and how Vercel tackles traffic-heavy Black Friday demands.

We’ll also look at why React Native continues to lead in mobile app development and Meta’s move from fact-checking to Community Notes.

Grab your coffee, settle in, and enjoy this week’s edition of Frictionless!

In the Queue

• Switching from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Headless

• How an Interactive Guide Helped Amplience Gain New Leads

• Twenty Leadership Lessons

• Challenges of Scaling Databases

• Introducing Generative Driven Design

Reduce Friction

The Engineering Leader of 2025 and Beyond

Future engineering leaders will embrace generative AI, adapt to a Gen-Z workforce, and make quality a shared responsibility. Achieving success in 2025 means staying flexible and open to change.

Balancing Engineering Excellence with Business Value

Focus on value, not perfection. Smaller updates reduce risk, deliver faster, and keep teams aligned with strategic goals. Sometimes, it’s okay to push less critical work aside to meet changing priorities.

Is Your Project on Schedule? How Do You Know?

Hitting deadlines requires prioritizing major milestones and staying flexible when things don’t go as planned. Rather than stressing over rigid schedules, aim to establish open communication and work together with your team to keep things moving forward.

Twenty Tiny Leadership Lessons

While it might not be possible to become a better leader after reading a single article, taking these twenty smaller lessons to heart can set you up for future success. Leading by example or knowing when to delegate might make a huge difference for your team.

Deepen Your Expertise

How AI-Assisted Coding Will Change Software Engineering: Hard Truths

AI coding tools are a great tool for software engineering, automating tedious tasks and boosting productivity. While it can typically get about 70% of the job done, Gergely Orosz and Addy Osmani highlight AI still relies on human creativity and expertise to deliver quality outcomes.

The Time for React Native is Now

If you’re planning a new mobile app, React Native remains a strong contender. With a new architecture for better performance, upgraded DevTools for easier debugging, and Expo simplifying setup and deployment, it’s no surprise giants like Shopify, Microsoft, and Meta trust it for their projects.

A Tale of Database Performance at Scale

Scaling databases comes with tough challenges, from managing massive data volumes to optimizing queries and indexing. Learn how smart strategies and ongoing tuning can keep performance smooth as your systems grow.

Lower Prices for Domains on Vercel

In a recent push to make hosting on their platform more affordable, Vercel lowered the prices for purchasing domains by up to 50%. 

React vs Svelte – Which is Better for Your Business in 2025?

Choosing between React and Svelte comes down to your project needs and preferences. React offers scalability, a massive ecosystem, and stable support, while Svelte focuses on simplicity, smaller bundles, and faster performance.

GDD: Generative Driven Design

Have you heard about Generative Driven Design (GDD)? It’s a new development approach, which instead of relying on external tools, embeds AI components that allow software to adapt and evolve on its own based on high-level instructions. It’s an exciting shift that promises smarter, more adaptable systems.

Increase Scalability

The Making of Amplience's Next.js-Powered Interactive Onboarding Guide

Amplience, a headless CMS platform, teamed up with Pagepro to create an interactive "Get Started" guide, showcasing their dynamic content capabilities and flexibility. Built to provide developers with a hands-on experience, the guide helped drive new subscriptions, prospects, and leads within weeks.

The Architecture of Canva's Data Platform

Canva’s huge data platform runs on Snowflake, handling 25+ petabytes and 90M queries monthly. To track usage and optimize performance, they’ve built a monitoring system, which helps lower costs and support their growing user base.

Building the Black Friday-Cyber Monday Live Dashboard

To prove their tools can handle the pressure of high traffic, Vercel showed off how they built a Black Friday-Cyber Monday dashboard. The platform, powered by Next.js, updates live metrics like deployments every 10 seconds, using clever backend optimizations to handle shopping sprees with no snags.

Pinterest's Use of Honeycomb for Enhanced CI Observability and Build Stability

Pinterest improved their CI workflows by integrating Honeycomb, a data observability tool that makes it easier to spot and fix issues. Now their Mobile Builds team can create faster, more stable pipelines, further streamlining the platform’s development.

Headless Salesforce: An Incremental Migration From Monolith to Composable

Switching from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to a headless setup can boost speed and flexibility. A sportswear brand took a step-by-step approach, halving load times, cutting cart abandonment by 28%, and increasing mobile conversions by 15%.

Just Cool

Meta Retreats From Fact-Checking Content: What It Means for Businesses

Meta is retiring third-party fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram in the U.S., replacing it with a user-driven "Community Notes" system like X (formerly Twitter). Although it lowers moderation costs, this change might lead to more misinformation, potentially affecting the reputation of numerous brands on the platform.

Let’s Stay in Touch! 📨 

Do you have any comments about this newsletter issue or questions you want to ask? Drop me a message or book a meeting.