Engineering
Build notes from shipping our products — mobile platforms, databases, and on-device AI.
Android ships java.sql, so desktop database drivers should just work — and they almost do. The four ways stock JDBC drivers break on ART, why Oracle's can never load, and the strip-and-replace patch that fixes the rest.
Two independently written RDS IAM token signers agreed byte-for-byte — and were both wrong. Why UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD is an S3-ism, and how the AWS CLI works as a free, offline, byte-exact oracle (even with expired credentials).
Gemma 4 going Apache-2.0 and ungated is what makes in-app model downloads legal. The download state machine, the native-engine lifecycle bugs, and why the iOS build ended up on Apple's OS-resident model instead.