Build in Public

Hello!

My name is Ralph and I’m the creator of poketto.me—among other things. In this blog, I document the amusing, peculiar, intriguing, and strange things I learn while designing and building applications of all kinds.

If you’re interested in tech, check out the posts tagged #dev. If you’re curious about design, check out #design and #frontend. And if you’re interested in product management or go-to-market strategies, I’ve got you covered as well.

I’m still adding new insights, so follow me on Bluesky, LinkedIn, or Substack to stay up to date, or subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed.

#88 The memory consumption patterns of LangChain are… disturbing

As I said in No, you don’t have to learn LangChain, we shouldn’t get distracted by the artificial complexity introduced by our frameworks. LangChain is mostly a wrapper around the REST APIs of various LLM providers. Useful? Yes—switching between models becomes easy. But here’s a mystery I can’t explain. When I added Gemini as a fallback to DeepSeek (see yesterday’s post about DeepSeek refusing to touch Chinese politics), I thought it would be straightforward: ...

#87 DeepSeek really won’t touch anything related to Chinese politics

For most use cases in poketto.me, I’m pretty happy with #DeepSeek: it’s cheap, reliable, and the output quality matches any other LLM I’ve tried. But there’s one big caveat: anything related to Chinese politics can trigger an immediate refusal. Example: Right after the launch of poketto.me, a user tried saving an article about the September 3rd Beijing meeting between Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, et al. ( https://orf.at/stories/3404330/) ...

#86 AI can’t replace a great marketing team (but sometimes it’s better than nothing)

Marketing done well is so much more than cranking out ad copy or polishing sales slides. In all my corporate product roles—Fabasoft, Borland / Micro Focus, smec—I got to work with fantastic marketing teams. They shaped products, challenged ideas, and saw the bigger picture we tech-focused product folks often missed. With poketto.me, though, it was just me. So I leaned on ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini more often than I liked—sometimes with good results, sometimes… not so much. ...

#85 Klaviyo: Much more than a Shopify plug-in

As I mentioned in GMail’s spam filter is pretty weird, reliably sending emails is harder than it looks. But email marketing automation is also one of the most powerful tools you can add to your stack. So, I went looking for a simple, cheap, API-based solution I could plug into poketto.me. Ideally: ✔️ Free for small usage (given my current revenue = zero) ✔️ Easy integration with my stack existing stack (Python backend, Posthog for analytics) ✔️ Scalable once I need more ...

#84 You can customize the text selection menu in your Android app

As I mentioned in In-place DOM manipulation: Thorny as ever, text selection in browsers can get tricky fast. For poketto.me, the challenge was even bigger: the web app runs inside a hosted WebView in an Android app. Mobile text selection already behaves differently from desktop, and the embedding scenario didn’t make things easier. After wrestling with a few awkward bugs, though, I found an elegant solution. On the web, when a user finishes selecting text, poketto.me immediately converts the selection into a highlight (default color). On Android, however, a tiny system context menu pops up with entries like Copy, Select All, Web Search, etc. At first this got in the way—but it turns out you can customize this menu on a per-activity basis! ...

#83 The Gemini API for Video Understanding is surprisingly good

As I mentioned in Gemini’s URL Context feature is 90% hype, 10% value, I was pretty disappointed with Gemini’s “URL Context” feature. But “Video Understanding”? That one actually works like a charm. How it works: 👉 Provide a YouTube video link 👉 Ask Gemini questions about the video 👉 Get a structured response back For poketto.me, this unlocks a really neat feature: users can save any YouTube video in the app and either watch it later or read a textual description of the video. ...

#82 Gemini’s “URL Context” feature is 90% hype, 10% value

I’ll admit—I was pretty excited when Google announced that the Gemini API would support a new “URL Context” tool. The idea: you could “ask” Gemini about the content of a specific web page, with Google handling all the heavy lifting. The documentation even shows a neat example: send Gemini two recipe URLs and prompt it to compare ingredients and cooking times. If it worked, this would’ve been a game-changer for poketto.me: ...

#81 LinkedIn isn’t working

For the last 91 days, I’ve posted one of these “things I learned when building poketto.me” every day here on LinkedIn. What was my motivation for that? 1️⃣ To reflect more deeply on the countless things I’ve learned. Think of it like a gratitude journal: by writing down the small technical quirks, process hacks, and organizational lessons, I hoped to make them stick better. 2️⃣ To help others avoid some of the many mistakes I've made. ...

#80 There is no cloud (it’s just somebody else’s computer)

…and ultimately, that “someone” is going to send you a real invoice for actual money. In my case, I’m running poketto.me almost entirely on Google Cloud. While it’s not terribly expensive right now, it is a cost I had to factor into my pricing strategy. But here’s the good news: Google offers various programs to support early-stage startups! Check out https://cloud.google.com/startup?hl=en for details. Today, I’m happy to share that poketto.me made it into the “START” tier of that program, which means: no Google Cloud bills in my mailbox for the foreseeable future! ...

#79 How to plan a time-based launch 🚀

Since early August, I’d been toying with the idea of taking poketto.me “out of beta.” But with travel planned for late September through mid-October, timing became critical. I needed to launch before leaving, so I set “early September” as the latest possible date—giving myself at least two weeks to handle any post-launch chaos. The first question I asked: What does “launch” actually mean? What’s different afterwards? Here’s what came to mind: ...