Architecture lessons, performance war stories, and engineering patterns from two decades of building production systems.
64
Articles
101
Topics
20+
Years XP
Five principles that separate code you can still touch in six months from code that becomes a minefield. Each principle explained in plain English with before/after code in TypeScript, Java, Python, and C#.
Unit, integration, contract, and e2e — when each actually pays off, the modern test pyramid, and a practical policy for flaky tests. Concrete advice for a service that ships.
Instrumenting a production Node.js service for traces, metrics, and logs with OpenTelemetry — plus correlation by trace ID, exporter choices, and what breaks in production.
How to change a production schema without taking traffic down — expand/contract, backfills, dual-writes, online DDL, and the migrations that always bite you.
From kill switches to percentage rollouts — how to decouple deploy from release, evaluate self-hosted vs SaaS flag platforms, and keep flag debt from eating your codebase.
The 2021 OWASP Top 10, but with actual vulnerable Node.js and Next.js snippets and the fixes I ship in production. Concrete examples beat awareness posters.
Cache-aside, write-through, write-behind, read-replicas, edge caches, HTTP ETags, and stale-while-revalidate — how to pick the right caching pattern and how to invalidate without tears.
Chunking, embeddings, hybrid retrieval, reranking, citation, and evaluation — a practical guide to building a RAG pipeline that survives real traffic and messy documents.
How to test prompts, catch regressions, score outputs, and defend against prompt injection — with a small eval harness you can ship this week.
When a monorepo pays off, which toolchain to pick, and what a sensible layout looks like for a small-to-mid team — pnpm workspaces, Turborepo, Nx, and the newer options.