Everything You Need to Build Faster

The Holiday Readiness Playbook is a 6-week tactical guide that helps e-commerce teams optimize systems, streamline user experiences, and accelerate infrastructure ahead of peak Q4 traffic. It provides actionable steps, checklists, and frameworks to boost speed, resilience, and conversions during the year’s most competitive shopping season.

Harper is a scalable, high-performance database for businesses needing system-wide flexibility. Vercel, in contrast, is a low-cost front-end hosting platform for developers focused on web deployment.

When performance and cost matter, Harper’s fused‑stack outperforms Heroku’s multi‑service architecture by orders of magnitude—at a fraction of the price

Page Cache delivers sub-second product pages by accepting your existing SSR or static framework, pre-rendering where it helps, and injecting dynamic attributes (price, availability, promos, personalization) at the last responsible moment—often hitting ~600 ms for 95% of users. Running on Harper’s unified platform, it serves fully formed pages from the edge with minimal code change, simplifying infrastructure while improving SEO, conversions, and global reliability.

Most apps start simple then accrete APIs, auth, caching, and realtime—Harper flips that by making your schema the app: define tables and relationships and you instantly get generated APIs, integrated caching, and pub/sub. This schema-defined approach lets teams prototype in hours and scale without glue code, extending with computed fields and custom APIs as needs grow.

Harper lets teams pre-render pages for global speed while keeping prices, inventory, and promos live by storing fast-changing values as lightweight attributes and injecting them at request time. By unifying database, cache, messaging, and runtime in a distributed platform, it removes ISR/API complexity, avoids full-page revalidation, and delivers static-level performance without rewrites or stack changes.

Early Hints let browsers start fetching critical assets before HTML arrives, shaving precious time off metrics like Largest Contentful Paint — even if Safari hasn’t caught up yet. With support in Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, plus simple fallbacks for others, it’s a low-effort, high-ROI optimization that delivers real-world speed gains today.

This post is about using Harper's GraphQL capabilities to build an API for a calendar and scheduling backend with minimal code

Simplify e-commerce development with Harper’s unified architecture. Database, cache, and real-time updates all run in one high-performance system.

In the latest Harper SEO Series session, experts from SearchSide and Akamai explored how implementing Early Hints (HTTP 103) can dramatically speed up website load times and boost SEO performance. The session showcased a live demo where Akamai EdgeWorkers and Harper worked together to cut Largest Contentful Paint from 2.9s to 2.0s — proving that even fractional improvements in speed can lead to meaningful business gains.

When a user taps a link, Harper and Akamai work in tandem to instantly determine the optimal destination and start loading assets—before the page even begins rendering. By combining ultra-fast distributed redirects with Early Hints, this system delivers a seamless, high-performance experience that feels instantaneous to the end user.

This O’Reilly report explores how unified platforms combined with service fabrics transform distributed systems by reducing complexity, latency, and cost while enabling global scalability and resiliency. Through real-world use cases and migration strategies, it demonstrates how organizations can achieve faster performance, stronger reliability, and measurable business value.

Simplify social app development with Harper’s unified architecture. Database, cache, and real-time updates run together for faster, seamless user experiences.

Retailers no longer need to choose between site speed and data freshness. Harper’s new pre-rendering pattern injects dynamic attributes like price and availability into a static page shell at request time—delivering lightning-fast load times with real-time accuracy, all without re-platforming.

DEF CON is a vibrant, curiosity-driven hacker conference where Chris Nelson finds a welcoming community eager to share, teach, and explore the boundaries of technology together. From lock-picking to RF hacking with tools like the Flipper Zero, it’s a place to learn by doing—and to discover that hacking is more about understanding than breaking.

GraphQL streamlines API development by letting clients request exactly the data they need from a single endpoint, but its dynamic queries often shatter traditional caching, driving up origin fetches, egress costs, and latency at scale. By progressing from full-response caching to partial field-level caching, then adding event-driven replication and ultimately a decentralized edge data layer—as embodied by platforms like Harper—teams can reclaim performance and budget predictability without sacrificing developer agility.

Drew Chambers joined the EcomOps podcast to share what I’ve learned from years of helping leading brands scale digital commerce—from fast websites to customer-first storytelling—and how Harper is enabling that with breakthrough performance tech. We covered why milliseconds matter, why performance is a growth channel, and how enterprise teams can build infrastructure that scales with their biggest moments.

Google's March 2024 rollout of Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a Core Web Vitals metric marks a new chapter in SEO, emphasizing real-world interactivity over traditional speed signals. INP captures the full lifecycle of a user’s interaction, making responsiveness a key driver of search rankings, user experience, and conversion rates. SEO teams that optimize for INP—especially on mobile—gain a measurable advantage in performance, engagement, and business impact.

“Bot Caching as an SEO Strategy — and a Safety Net,” explains how treating search bots as a distinct audience can significantly boost both SEO performance and site resilience. By implementing bot-specific caching — especially through Harper and Akamai’s edge-based architecture — companies can ensure faster indexing, maintain uptime during outages, and drive more reliable revenue, particularly during high-traffic events.

Harper is a unified, globally distributed web platform that combines database, cache, messaging, and application logic into a single runtime, eliminating the complexity of traditional multi-service stacks. Designed for latency-sensitive applications, it delivers ultra-low-latency performance, massive scalability, and seamless global synchronization—all in one simplified, developer-friendly architecture.

Harper's blog argues that web performance—especially fast load times measured by metrics like LCP—is critical to user engagement, revenue, and SEO. Traditional architectures often fall short, while “fused” stacks that bring compute and data closer to users enable sub-second speeds and better business outcomes. Performance isn't just technical polish—it’s a strategic advantage.

Harper’s Early Hints solution accelerates web performance by sending critical assets to browsers using HTTP 103 responses before the full page loads, improving Core Web Vitals, SEO, and conversions. Built on Harper’s fused architecture, it delivers sub-2 ms latency at scale with zero changes to application code.

The blog highlights a key contradiction in AI-powered e-commerce: smarter experiences often come with slower performance. Centralized architectures introduce latency that hurts user experience and revenue, especially when milliseconds matter. To solve this, AI must run at the edge—where vector search, semantic caching, and product logic are co-located—delivering instant, relevant results without routing through distant servers. By fusing intelligence with speed, edge-native AI turns performance into a competitive advantage.