Archive
All publications
Every article from the Snakken dev and red team — architecture decisions, security research, and blameless post-mortems.
2026-07-21 Events on the bus, truth in the database Snakken's backend announces what happens inside it as events. We set two rules before the first line of configuration: the database stays the only source of truth, and the bus obeys the same privacy line as our API. What those rules do to the design — and what it costs. Engineering 2026-07-10 The run club around the corner Strava just added race and club event discovery. We look at what that launch gets right, what neighbourhood groups on snakken already do, and the browsing view we want to open next. Field Note 2026-07-05 Finding local topics without sending posts to US AI services Local topics should surface on their own when something is happening on your streets — without a predefined list of categories, and without user posts being shipped to a US AI service to work out what they are about. How we detect emergent neighbourhood topics on our own hardware in the EU, keep a topic from exposing one person, and the tuning problem short German posts handed us. Engineering 2026-06-29 An old idea, and why we're building it now The first sketches go back to university: you hear about the street party two doors down days late, while a feed cheerfully shows you a festival 500 km away. A note on an old idea, and why it finally felt worth building now. Field Note 2026-06-28 An evacuation order should not have to be a tweet A summer of heatwaves, wildfire and water shortages puts the question plainly: how do you get an official warning to exactly the people standing in the danger zone? We sketch what it would take for Snakken to carry emergency warnings — and how the same location design that keeps our servers from seeing your coordinates is what makes it possible. A design exploration, not a shipped feature. Engineering 2026-06-22 Moderating a feed without watching the people in it Most content moderation runs on signals we threw away on purpose: behavioural profiles, the social graph, location history. A look at the mid-2026 state of the art, why a feed our servers can't surveil needs a different design, and how Quick Freeze and the Login-Falle fit a platform built to keep as little as possible. Engineering 2026-06-12 The five minutes snakken.app redirected to itself A one-line nginx change meant to canonicalize www took the landing page down with an infinite redirect loop. Timeline, root cause (a missing default_server), and the invariant we added — a small, complete post-mortem of a small, complete failure. Post-Mortem 2026-05-15 One feed, two streams of time Snakken's feed mixes things that expire in hours with things that should exist for years. The data model that makes a moving-boxes post and the corner café live in the same stream — and the reaper that keeps the ephemeral side honest. Engineering 2026-04-28 Passkeys only: no passwords to leak Snakken ships without a password field. Field notes from building passkey-only authentication for a mobile app — what got easier, what got harder, and why "we can't leak what we don't have" is worth the support cases. Field Note 2026-03-05 Your exact location never leaves your device Snakken is a location app whose servers never see a location. How we use H3 cells computed on the phone to know your neighbourhood without ever learning your coordinates — and why we designed the API so we couldn't cheat later. Security