All 43 articles, sorted alphabetically
Coding Assistants: How DeepSeek-V3 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet Became the New Standard for Software Engineering
The dream of "AI pair programming"—an intelligent assistant that truly understands code and helps engineers build better software faster—has long been a holy grail…
Read article →LoRA and QLoRA: Fine-tuning a Trillion-Parameter Model on a Single Home GPU
The era of massive foundation models—GPT-3, Llama 2/3, Mistral—has unleashed unprecedented AI capabilities.
Read article →Context Connect: A Word Context Game
Context Connect: A Word Context Game
Read article →A/B experimentation platform architecture
Deep-dive on building an A/B testing platform: deterministic salted assignment, exposure logging at the call site, the exposure-to-event join, a stats…
Read article →Ansible Introduction, in depth: inventory, modules, playbooks, idempotence, roles and running it safely
A practical introduction to Ansible: how agentless push over SSH works, inventories and groups, modules and fully qualified names, playbooks, handlers…
Read article →Argo CD Introduction, in depth: the GitOps reconciler, the Application resource, sync and health, waves and hooks, ApplicationSets and running it safely
A first-principles introduction to Argo CD: why pull-based GitOps, the components and how a change flows from a commit to the cluster, the Application…
Read article →Batch Processing Architecture in Depth: bounded intervals, idempotent overwrite, atomic publish, backfills and quality gates
How to design batch pipelines that can be rerun safely: bounded inputs and the logical interval, the job as a pure function of its interval, idempoten…
Read article →Change Data Capture Architecture in Depth: capture methods, snapshots, ordering, schema changes and idempotent sinks
A practical architecture guide to change data capture: query, trigger and log-based capture, the change-event envelope, the snapshot-to-stream handoff…
Read article →Real-time chat messaging architecture
Deep-dive on building a real-time chat system: persistent-connection gateways, a write path that persists and sequences before acknowledging, fan-out …
Read article →CI/CD, in depth: pipeline architecture from commit to production, build once and promote by digest, trusted tests, deployment strategies, safe migrations and a secured pipeline
A first-principles guide to CI/CD: what continuous integration, delivery and deployment require, a pipeline that builds once and promotes one digest, …
Read article →Dead-letter queues -- where failed messages go to be dealt with
Deep-dive on dead-letter queues (DLQs): the poison-message problem, sidelining after max retries, retry-then-dead-letter, preserving context (error/at…
Read article →DevOps Introduction, in depth: the operating model behind the tools, from value streams and the Three Ways to error budgets and DORA metrics
A first-principles introduction to DevOps as an operating model: the problem it solves, CAMS and CALMS, the Three Ways, a worked value-stream example …
Read article →Distributed counter architecture
Deep-dive on distributed counters: sharding to eliminate write contention, local aggregation and atomic adds, cached rollups for hot reads, HyperLogLo…
Read article →Distributed Locks: Leases, Fencing Tokens, Split-Brain Safety
How distributed locks stay safe: consensus-backed leases with a TTL, renewal heartbeats, and fencing tokens that stop a paused holder corrupting state…
Read article →Docker Introduction, in depth: what a container really is, how images are built and stored, and how to run them safely
A first-principles introduction to Docker: containers as namespaced, cgroup-limited processes on an overlay filesystem, OCI images and registries, the…
Read article →Email Delivery Architecture, in depth: the spool, per-provider scheduling, IP pools and warm-up, DKIM key rotation and the event pipeline
How a transactional and bulk email sending platform is built: the accept path and durable spool, the message state machine, grouping by receiving prov…
Read article →Feature flag architecture, in depth: flags inside the application with OpenFeature, typed registries, safe defaults, testing and flag debt
How to architect feature flags in application code: the layers from call site to provider, OpenFeature providers, clients, evaluation context and eval…
Read article →Geo proximity search architecture
Deep-dive on nearest-neighbour search: why B-trees cannot index 2D, space-filling curves from geohash to S2 Hilbert ordering, quadtree adaptivity, the…
Read article →Git Branching Strategies, in depth: trunk-based, GitHub flow, Gitflow, release branches and how to choose
How Git branching strategies really differ: what a branch is, trunk-based development, GitHub flow, Gitflow and release branches, merge versus squash …
Read article →Helm Introduction, in depth: charts, templates, values, releases and the upgrade lifecycle, written for Helm 4
Learn Helm from first principles: the problem it solves, chart anatomy, Go templates and helpers, values precedence, a worked install-upgrade-rollback…
Read article →Idempotency keys
Deep-dive on idempotency keys: client key generation and reuse, the idempotency store and first-vs-replay logic, concurrency locking, result caching, …
Read article →Infrastructure as Code, in depth: desired state, plan and apply, state and locking, safe refactoring, pipelines and the failure modes that destroy production
A first-principles guide to Infrastructure as Code: declarative desired state versus imperative scripts, how plan and apply work over a dependency gra…
Read article →Inventory Reservation System Design: Preventing Oversell
How to design inventory reservation that never oversells: atomic check-and-decrement, TTL holds and a reaper, confirm on payment, idempotency, hot-SKU…
Read article →Kubernetes Introduction, in depth: desired state, control loops, the first five objects, a worked deployment and how to debug a Pod that will not run
A first-principles introduction to Kubernetes: the reconciliation model, what the API server, etcd, scheduler, controllers and kubelet each do on kube…
Read article →Leaderboard architecture, in depth: score semantics, sorted sets and tie-breaking, per-period boards, idempotent ingest, approximate rank, snapshots and fraud
How to build a leaderboard that stays correct at scale: best versus cumulative scores, Redis sorted sets, composite scores for tie-breaking within the…
Read article →News feed architecture
Deep-dive on building a social news feed at scale, where the central decision is when to do the work: fan-out on write (push a post id into every foll…
Read article →Notification System Architecture, in depth: event contract, preferences, dedupe, throttling, templates and push provider hygiene
How to build a notification system that sends the right message once: the event contract, the catalog, preference and consent storage, quiet hours, id…
Read article →Object storage architecture
Deep-dive on object storage system design: the flat, immutable key-to-blob model that trades POSIX semantics for exabyte scale, how eleven-nines durab…
Read article →Transactional Outbox Pattern: Solving the Dual-Write Problem
The transactional outbox pattern explained: write the event to an outbox table in the same transaction, relay via CDC or polling, use idempotent consu…
Read article →Payment Gateway Architecture: Idempotent Orchestration, Ledger
Payment gateway architecture: idempotency keys against double charges, tokenization and PCI scope, 3DS, double-entry ledger, sagas, reconciliation.
Read article →Priority queue service architecture
Deep-dive on priority queue services: why priority is a latency promise that only matters under contention, priority classes and ordering stores, the …
Read article →Rate limit system architecture, in depth: rate vs concurrency limits, cost-weighted budgets, tenant fairness and adaptive clients
How a production rate limit system fits together around the counter: rate limits versus concurrency limits and Little's law, cost-weighted limits…
Read article →Recommender architecture, in depth: candidate generation, two-tower retrieval, ranking, re-ranking and the feedback loop
How a production recommender is built: the multi-stage funnel, candidate sources, a two-tower retrieval model trained with in-batch softmax and served…
Read article →Saga Pattern Architecture in Depth: running sagas on a durable workflow engine, versioning in-flight sagas, testing compensations and operating a saga fleet
Sagas as production infrastructure: hosting a saga on a durable workflow engine such as Temporal, classifying failures into retry, compensate or wait,…
Read article →Distributed Job Scheduler Design: Beyond Cron, Locks, Retries
How to design a distributed job scheduler: why cron fails, a durable job store, leader election and locks for exactly-once-ish runs, retries, DAGs and…
Read article →Search architecture, in depth: the ranking cascade, feature logging, judgments, learning to rank and interleaving
How the relevance side of a search system is built: the staged retrieval and ranking cascade with a latency budget, query understanding, multiple retr…
Read article →Terraform Introduction, in depth: the declarative model, plan and apply over a dependency graph, state and locking, modules, safe refactoring and the failure modes that bite teams
A first-principles introduction to Terraform: how configuration, state and provider APIs are reconciled by a plan, a worked AWS example with for_each,…
Read article →Typeahead architecture
Deep-dive on autocomplete systems: mining and scoring query logs, compiling FST indexes with per-node top-k, prefix-sharded in-memory serving, edge ca…
Read article →URL shortener architecture
Deep-dive on designing a URL shortener: the read/write skew and immutable mappings, counter+base62 vs KGS vs hashing key generation, cache-fronted red…
Read article →Webhook delivery platform architecture
Deep-dive on webhook delivery systems: durable ingest and subscription fan-out, per-endpoint circuit breakers, jittered exponential backoff, HMAC sign…
Read article →Prompt Injection 101: How Hackers 'Jailbreak' AI and How to Defend Against It
Large Language Models (LLMs) are designed to be flexible, creative, and follow instructions presented in natural language.
Read article →Self-Healing Code: Using GenAI as a Smart Automation Layer for Legacy Codebase Migration
Nearly every mature enterprise is anchored by a "digital ball and chain": a critical, legacy codebase.
Read article →Tool Use (Function Calling): How Transformers Learned to Use Calculators, APIs, and Python
Large Language Models (LLMs) are masterful linguists. They can generate fluent, coherent text, summarize vast documents, and even craft creative prose.
Read article →