Notes from the keyboard
Essays on architecture, databases, and the small engineering decisions that quietly add up, written between shipping things for millions of users.
Featured · Architecture
When a side project suddenly has to answer a hundred thousand requests a minute, the comfortable abstractions start to leak. Here's what actually held up, and what I'd never do again.
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Databases
For years I treated the database as a dumb bucket behind an ORM. Then a slow query took down production and taught me to read an execution plan. A love letter to the most underrated tool we own.
Performance
Eight kilobytes of RAM is a strict teacher. The habits I picked up squeezing firmware onto tiny chips turned out to be exactly what my bloated web services needed.
Infrastructure
You don't need a platform team to get real value from containers. A no-nonsense setup that fits in one file, one registry, and a Friday afternoon.
Data
We pushed both at a billion rows and measured everything. The answer wasn't "use the fast one"; it was knowing which questions each database was built to answer.
Craft
Readable code isn't about pleasing a linter. It's the difference between a 4pm fix and a 2am incident. Small habits that keep a codebase friendly to future-you.