Architecture & Patterns

36+ min ago   (1073+ words) An update on building my portfolio, learning to code, and discovering that I have absolutely no idea how deep this rabbit hole goes. Last week, I finally started working on my portfolio. This week, I decided I was going to…...

9+ min ago   (205+ words) At twenty past eleven on a Tuesday in June our order database stopped accepting writes. Reads worked. Every insert, update and delete failed with database is not accepting commands to avoid wraparound data loss. Autovacuum had been running anti wraparound…...

10+ min ago   (212+ words) We pay our suppliers through a payment provider's payouts API. Every payout request carries an idempotency key built from our payout id, so that if we send the same request twice the provider recognises it and returns the original result…...

5+ min ago   (79+ words) How to tell if a web page actually changed — not just its markup — using a normalized, versioned hash. A small pattern that saves real work downstream. Tagged with java, architecture, webdev, api. Liquid syntax error: Unknown tag 'endraw' Templates let…...

5+ min ago   (79+ words) The naive 'N failures and this account is locked' turns your brute-force defense into a denial-of-service tool. The fix is one decision: what you key on. Tagged with security, redis, java, webdev. Liquid syntax error: Unknown tag 'endraw' Templates let…...

22+ hour, 53+ min ago   (510+ words) Caching in Node.js usually forces a frustrating compromise. You either stick with a basic in-memory Map (or LRU-cache) that risks running your process out of memory (OOM) under heavy loads, or you accept the network latency floor and serialization…...

6+ hour, 40+ min ago   (275+ words) If your application needs to run in multiple regions, you can send events to buses in different regions, but there is no built-in deduplication. So if you need all events to be present in both regions, you must craft the…...

5+ min ago   (1213+ words) On February 17, 2026, Apache Kafka 4.2 shipped with this line in the release announcement: "Kafka Queues (Share Groups) is now production-ready." That sentence quietly reopens one of backend engineering's oldest arguments. For years, "should my job queue be Postgres or Kafka?" had…...

11+ min ago   (207+ words) When building real-time clinical AI systems and temporal digital twin simulators, latency and resilience are not just performance metrics—they are hard reliability requirements. Every clinical evaluation or simulation needs sub-millisecond repeatability, but cloud network hiccups or unprovisioned tables should…...

2+ hour, 57+ min ago   (815+ words) Written with AI assistance and edited by me. For most of my career, the order was fixed. Write the spec. Get it reviewed. Hand it to design. Wait. That order made sense when building anything clickable took a designer a…...