Notes on backend architecture, distributed systems, and building production software.
June 10, 2026
Before writing a line of infrastructure code for a new side project, I try to isolate and prove the one assumption that would kill the whole idea if it's wrong — everything else can wait.
April 15, 2026
When a from-address literally determines who owns a deal, trusting default email authentication handling isn't good enough. Here's what a focused security review of an SES inbound pipeline actually covers.
March 25, 2026
Deployed database RPCs can quietly drift from what's checked into the repo. A small CI/CD step that diffs the two and drops orphans keeps that drift from turning into a debugging session.
March 10, 2026
A practical breakdown of the performance tuning, instance right-sizing, and architectural changes that cut our AWS bill by more than a third — without a single reliability regression.
February 5, 2026
Large PDFs kept timing out during OCR, and every retry started over from page one. Incremental checkpointing turned that into forward progress instead of repeated failure.
January 22, 2026
Per-row writes against an entity-attribute-value schema were creating lock contention on our hottest path. Here's how batching the writes fixed it.