Studio Notes — Mangobaz IT Solutions

Oct 17, 2026 · By Hadi Zulfiqar

The 2026 Cloud Repatriation: Why We Left Hyperscaler Serverless for Bare Metal (And Cut Our Infrastructure Bill by 74%)

An inside look into our 2026 infrastructure migration from hyperscaler serverless (AWS Lambda, Aurora Serverless, API Gateway) to dedicated bare-metal servers. Discover how unreserved memory inflation, $0.09/GB egress penalties, and cold starts drove our cloud bill to $4,250/month—and how a hybrid architecture of AMD EPYC bare metal, direct-attached PCIe 5.0 NVMe RAID-1, WireGuard failover, and Cloudflare Anycast edge caching cut ongoing infrastructure costs by 74% while dropping p99 database latency from 48ms to 1.8ms.

Read article →

Studio Notes

Sep 2, 2026 · By Hadi Zulfiqar

Open-Source Libraries We Actually Use in Production (2026 Edition)

The libraries we depend on in production, the ones we dropped this year, and the ones we are watching. JavaScript, .NET, databases, CSS, and tools.

Read article →

Studio Notes

Sep 1, 2026 · By Hadi Zulfiqar

What 40 Projects Taught Us About Scoping, Sprint Length, and Saying No

Lessons from 40 projects. Scope is everything, sprint length matters, design before code, yes is more dangerous than no, and nine other hard-won truths.

Read article →

Studio Notes

Aug 31, 2026 · By Hadi Zulfiqar

Behind the Mangobaz Stack: 6 Tools That Run Every Project We Ship

The opinionated toolchain for our two-person studio. ASP.NET Core, Vue, Vite, PostgreSQL, Tailwind, and GitHub — plus the supporting tools that make everything work.

Read article →

Studio Notes

Aug 30, 2026 · By Hadi Zulfiqar

How We Price a Six-Week Build (And Why We Won't Quote You a Number Without a Call)

Why we refuse to quote from email, what the first call is for, how our pricing actually works, and how to talk to us if you are price-sensitive.

Read article →

Studio Notes

Aug 29, 2026 · By Hadi Zulfiqar

Why We Picked Vue.js Over React for Our Last Three Builds

The opinionated, internal-style explanation of why Vue is our default, including the trade-offs we accepted and the few cases where we would still reach for something else.

Read article →