hookay
Building social software that knows as little as possible — and works anyway.
The engineering track: the craft of privacy-preserving product engineering. The patterns, the trade-offs, and the times a constraint made the product better. Where the security track covers what we learn from attacking our systems, this one covers what we learn from building them.
Why we're writing this down before we launch
Hookay isn't live yet. Starting the engineering notebook now — while the decisions are still warm and nothing is too embarrassing to admit — is itself one of those decisions. What this site is for, what we'll publish during the build, and the editorial rules we're committing to in public.
Read the full article →Recent publications
Constraints we chose on purpose
Most engineering blogs describe what their teams may do. Ours is easier to explain by what we've ruled out — and why the product got better for it.
Privacy is a build constraint
Data minimization isn't reviewed in, it's designed in. If a feature needs data we don't want to hold, we redesign the feature. Every time, the result has been a more interesting product.
European stack, end to end
EU sovereignty shapes every dependency decision — from cloud to AI APIs to analytics. Constraint breeds invention: we've built things others outsource, and we write about what that costs and earns.
On-device or not at all
AI features have no server fallback. This is a harder engineering problem than calling an API, which is exactly why it's worth writing about.
Boring where it counts
We spend our novelty budget on privacy engineering and product. Everything else is proven, documented, replaceable technology — chosen so a small team can run it well.
What we build with
The public version — the same one in our job postings. Deep dives on individual choices appear as articles above.
// What you won't find here: our topology, our configurations, or anything that maps our attack surface. That editorial rule holds for both tracks — lessons, not blueprints.
What we'll give back
Nothing is released yet — we're pre-launch. But these pieces are being built with extraction in mind, because the next privacy-first platform shouldn't start from zero.
Build the app people don't delete
We're a small European team building social infrastructure for queer life — with privacy as the engineering brief, not the legal afterthought. If the articles above read like problems you want to own, we should talk.
// Remote within the EU · German or English working language · jobs@hookay.eu