Writing for engineers
who care about the
inside of the machine.
Long-form essays, postmortems, and field notes on systems, performance, AI, and the discipline of shipping.
NoSQL Graph Models: When Relationships Aren't Just Joins
Graph databases shine when relationships are paramount, enabling complex traversals that cripple relational systems. This article dissects NoSQL graph models, their ideal use cases, operational realities, and common pitfalls for backend and infra engineers.
Graph Algorithms: The Backend Engineer's Guide to Connected Systems
Graph algorithms are fundamental to managing interconnected data in backend systems. This article explores their practical applications in dependency resolution, pathfinding, and network analysis, contrasting storage approaches and detailing production-grade performance considerations.
Architecting in Agile: From Ivory Tower to Integrated Reality
Agile methods for architects aren't about specific frameworks but integrating architectural oversight into iterative development. It's about balancing emergent design with strategic direction, managing technical debt, and evolving the architect's role from a gatekeeper to an enabler.
LinkedIn for Engineers: A Production Handbook to Getting Hired
Forget the 'personal branding' gurus. A senior backend engineer dissects how LinkedIn actually works for tech hiring: optimizing your profile like an API contract, navigating recruiter search indices, and building signal paths that actually land interviews, not just pings.
How to Read Flame Graphs: From Pprof to Production Debugging
Flame graphs visualize CPU usage and call stacks, making them indispensable for pinpointing performance bottlenecks. They show where your code spends its time, helping identify hot paths, I/O waits, and inefficient algorithms under production loads. This guide covers interpreting their visual structure, decoding common anti-patterns, and understanding their utility in real-world debugging scenarios.
Achieving Sub-Millisecond Latency & High Throughput in Trading Applications
Building trading applications with extremely low latency and high throughput requires a meticulous approach beyond typical enterprise development. This piece dives into hardware optimizations, kernel bypass techniques, specialized software architectures, efficient memory management, and careful language selection, while acknowledging the inherent impossibility of true "0ms" latency. It covers the trade-offs involved and common pitfalls, illustrated with real-world scenarios
How Video Platforms Serve Billions of Streams Fast
Ever wondered how platforms like YouTube serve countless videos instantly to millions, often without a hitch? It's not magic, but a deep dive into distributed systems, intelligent caching, and global content delivery. This piece unpacks the core engineering behind managing petabytes of video data and delivering it at scale.
K6 and Stress Tests: Preventing Downtime Before It Hits
Load testing with tools like K6 isn't just a checkbox; it's a critical layer of defense against production outages. This article unpacks how targeted, realistic stress tests can reveal critical bottlenecks, connection pool saturation, cache stampedes, and other hidden failure modes before they take down your services. We'll look at crafting meaningful scenarios, interpreting the fallout, and avoiding common pitfalls that lead to downtime.
When "Works On My Machine" Dies: Advanced Backend Testing for Senior Engineers
Move past basic unit tests. This piece dives into how senior engineers approach testing complex backend systems, covering the practical application and pitfalls of unit, integration, E2E, contract, and performance testing, emphasizing observability, failure modes, and the trade-offs involved in ensuring production readiness.
Applied Mathematics: The Unsung Hero of Backend Engineering
Understanding how mathematics underpins robust system design, performance optimization, and reliable operations is crucial for backend and infrastructure engineers. This isn't about calculus exams, but about practical applications that prevent outages and scale systems.
Algorithms That Actually Matter When Your Backend Is Burning
Forget competitive programming. This deep dive covers the practical algorithms that fundamentally impact the scalability, reliability, and performance of distributed backend systems – from consistent hashing for caching to rate limiting and probabilistic data structures that keep services alive at 3 AM. It's about preventing pages, not solving puzzles.
30-Day Senior Engineer Job Hunt: A Brutally Honest Plan
Forget the hype. Landing a senior engineering role in 30 days is a focused sprint, not a magical journey. This guide cuts through the noise, offering a direct, no-BS approach to optimize your resume, conquer system design interviews, and understand the true cost of a new role, all from the perspective of an engineer who's seen the production fires – and the interview failures.