Short.io | Engineering
# engineering

A place for the engineering side of Short.io

We split the engineering writing out of the main blog. Here's what lives at /dev, why it's a separate section, and what to expect from it.

Andrii 2 min read #meta #announcements
Two publishing sections side by side — Cut Short at short.io and Engineering at short.io/dev, each with its own posts and its own tags — above a single shared /search bar with Blog and Engineering filters.

Short.io’s blog has always had one audience in mind: the people who use short links to run marketing. Analytics, campaign structure, deliverability, growth. That writing works, and it isn’t going anywhere.

But it left the other half of the story homeless. When we change how redirects resolve, or tighten a hot path, or throw out an abstraction that stopped paying rent, the natural place to write it up was a blog whose index reads like a marketing calendar. So the write-ups mostly didn’t happen.

This section fixes that. /dev is a separate blog with its own index, its own feed, and its own tags.

What “separate” actually means

It’s a genuinely different publication that happens to share a domain and a design:

  • Engineering posts never appear on the main blog index, its pagination, or /rss.xml.
  • The two sections have independent tag and category namespaces — /tag/updates and /dev/tag/updates are unrelated pages.
  • There’s a dedicated feed at /dev/rss.xml. Subscribe to one, both, or neither.

The one thing we deliberately kept shared is search. Both sections are in the same index at /search, with a Section filter to narrow down. Splitting search would have meant two search boxes and a decision for the reader to make before they’d typed anything.

What to expect

Fewer posts than the main blog, and longer ones. The bar is that a post should be useful to someone who doesn’t work here: a decision with its tradeoffs intact, a measurement with the methodology attached, a failure with the timeline.

Things we’re specifically not planning to publish: release notes dressed up as essays, and architecture diagrams with no accompanying argument.

Subscribing

The feed is at /dev/rss.xml. It carries the full post list for this section and nothing from the marketing blog.

First real post is next. It’s about the stack this very page is built on — which turns out to be a reasonable case study in picking boring technology on purpose.