rigami.
/// Guides

Ship better,
from the shipping floor.

Deep, opinionated guides from the senior engineers at Origami — mobile, AI, gaming, auctions, fintech and everything in between.

AI
12 min

How to build a RAG application in 2026

The end-to-end guide to retrieval-augmented generation — chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, reranking, evals.

Mobile
9 min

How to choose between React Native and Flutter

A practical framework for picking your cross-platform mobile stack in 2026.

Hiring
10 min

How to hire mobile app developers (2026 guide)

What to screen for, red flags, and how to structure a senior-only engagement.

Gaming
8 min

Class II vs Class III gaming — a plain-language explainer

Server-drawn bingo, RNG, GLI standards and what tribal vs commercial operators need.

Auctions
14 min

How to build an auction platform from scratch

Anti-snipe, soft-close, proxy bidding, escrow, KYC and live-stream — the full auction engine playbook.

AI
11 min

LLM observability in production

Tracing, evals, token budgets, cost ceilings and graceful degradation for LLM apps behind real logins.

Web
13 min

Next.js 14 App Router in production

Server components, edge runtimes, ISR, and the mistakes teams make on their first App Router site.

AI
11 min

Designing agentic LLM workflows

Tool-calling, retries, budgets, eval harnesses, and where agent designs commonly fail.

Growth
10 min

Programmatic SEO for B2B — a real playbook

How to scale from 40 to 2,000+ keywords without publishing junk.

Fintech
9 min

KYC / AML for consumer fintech apps

How to layer identity, sanctions and risk without wrecking activation.

Data
8 min

Postgres vs MongoDB in 2026 — an engineering POV

When to reach for Mongo, and why we still start almost every project on Postgres.

Auctions
10 min

Building a server-authoritative bidding engine

Latency, fairness, anti-snipe, tie-breaking and why the client is never the boss.

Mobile
9 min

Mobile app performance checklist for 2026

Cold-start budgets, 60fps lists, Hermes, JSC, and the metrics that actually predict retention.

Growth
12 min

ChatGPT SEO — how to become the answer AI cites

llms.txt, ai.txt, JSON-LD, entity SEO, and how to earn citations from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.

AI
9 min

Prompt caching and LLM cost control

Anthropic prompt caching, OpenAI cached prompts, and the cost-per-request tricks that keep AI features profitable.

AI
11 min

Voice agents with OpenAI Realtime

Low-latency turn-taking, barge-in, function-calling and telephony bridges for real voice AI.

Fintech
10 min

Cross-border payouts for creator + fan apps

Stripe Connect vs Wise vs Airwallex — routing payouts to global creators without wrecking margin.

AI
9 min

Content moderation with LLMs — what actually works

Where classical ML wins, where LLMs shine, and how to layer them without losing recall on edge cases.

Auctions
11 min

WebRTC live-streaming for auctions

Sub-second latency, phone bidders, auctioneer paddles and the actual protocol choices behind live sales.

Mobile
8 min

React Native vs native — the honest 2026 tradeoff

When to reach for Swift/Kotlin, when RN's ecosystem outperforms native, and how to hedge.

AI
9 min

pgvector vs Pinecone — vector search in 2026

Cost, latency, filtering and the reasons most teams should start on pgvector.

AdTech
8 min

Header bidding, explained plainly

Prebid, wrapper tags, SPO, and why publishers reach for header bidding over waterfall.

Gaming
10 min

How server-drawn Class II bingo actually works

Pattern determination, draw servers, RGS, and the compliance layer around tribal Class II gaming.

Gaming
9 min

GLI-19 compliance checklist for RMG operators

What Gaming Laboratories International tests for, and how to build so audits are boring.

Mobile
9 min

Expo + EAS in production

Managed workflow at scale — updates, credentials, submissions, and where you'll eventually eject.

Mobile
10 min

SwiftUI in production — 2026 edition

Widgets, Live Activities, StoreKit 2, and where UIKit still wins.

Mobile
10 min

Jetpack Compose in production

Modern Android UI at scale, performance rules, and Compose-for-multiplatform in real projects.

Growth
8 min

Shipping B2B SaaS onboarding that converts

Time-to-value, empty states, and the onboarding flows we've measured across dozens of launches.

Data
10 min

A pragmatic data warehouse for consumer apps

Segment or Rudderstack → Snowflake / BigQuery, dbt for modeling, and the dashboards you actually need on day one.

Mobile
9 min

Shipping mobile releases weekly without burning out

Trains, phased rollouts, TestFlight, Play internal — how modern mobile shops ship every 7 days.

Gaming
9 min

Designing for tribal casino players

Accessibility, hand economics, session length — the design POV we bring to Class II floors.

Product
10 min

Trust & safety for marketplaces

Fraud, identity, disputes, refunds — the guardrails every consumer marketplace eventually builds.

Data
9 min

Product analytics stack for mobile apps in 2026

Amplitude, Mixpanel, PostHog, RudderStack — what to pick, and how to avoid analytics debt.

Web
10 min

Shipping multi-tenant SaaS on Postgres

RLS, schema-per-tenant, role explosions, and cost management as you grow.

Health
10 min

HIPAA-compliant app development, without the theatre

BAAs, encryption at rest and in transit, audit trails, and where the compliance is actually earned.

AI
8 min

Structured outputs for LLM apps

JSON mode, function calls, grammars — and how to get 100% valid outputs without brittle prompts.

Gaming
9 min

Fraud patterns in real-money gaming

Bonus abuse, collusion, chip-dumping, mule accounts — and the risk engine that catches them.

Web
7 min

Cursor-based pagination for social feeds

Why offsets break at scale, and the cursor patterns that don't.

AI
8 min

Cost per inference for LLM features

Modeling the actual unit economics of LLM features — cache hits, routing, and cheap-shot fallbacks.

Hiring
10 min

How to hire AI developers who ship

What to screen for beyond 'has used ChatGPT' — and the take-homes that actually predict output.