Engineering researcher. APIs, databases, infrastructure, systems design.
Read replicas are sold as a free scaling lever and treated as one until the day a user posts a comment, refreshes, and watches it disappear. Replication lag, stale reads, and the read-your-writes problem are not edge cases. Here is the operational pattern that makes replicas work
Most services exit on SIGTERM by killing in-flight requests, dropping queue messages, and lying to the load balancer about their state. The right shutdown sequence is six steps in a specific order, and skipping any of them produces a class of bug that only appears under deployment pressure.
Per-call timeouts are easy to add and almost always wrong. A request budget that flows through the call tree as a deadline is harder to wire up and almost always right. Here is the pattern, why timeouts compound badly, and how to retrofit deadlines into an existing service.
For most of the eighteenth century, sailors could not determine their longitude at sea. The British Parliament offered the largest scientific prize of the era for a solution. The man who solved it was a self-taught Yorkshire carpenter, and the establishment spent forty years not paying him.
Whether to actually delete a row or just mark it deleted is a small decision early and a load-bearing one later. Here is how to think about which to use, what soft deletes actually buy you, and the pitfalls that catch teams six months in.
PostgreSQL vacuums, MySQL purges, SQLite checkpoints, MongoDB compacts. Every database does invisible background work to stay healthy. Here is what each kind of work is for, what happens when it cannot keep up, and how to know whether you should care.
Connection pooling is one of those things developers reach for early and tune late. Here is how to know whether you actually need it, what shape of pool fits which workload, and the failure modes that usually surprise teams in production.
A good CLI is a love letter to your API. It demonstrates how the API is supposed to be used, removes the first-time-user friction of curl and JSON, and becomes the primary tool for a meaningful slice of your power users. Here is what to put in one and what to leave out.
Time zones are an infinite source of bugs because nobody believes they will be the one to make the obvious mistake. Here is the short list of decisions that prevents almost all of them.
Almost everything you touch today fits something else because someone, often a long time ago, decided that this many millimeters meant this many threads. The history of standardization is the history of disagreement that finally stopped being interesting.
Offset pagination is fine until your table is large or your data shifts. Cursor pagination is harder to introduce after the fact. Here is the small set of decisions that determines whether your pagination scales.
Webhook development is the hardest part of integrating any payments, messaging, or third-party API. Here is a workflow that makes it feel like normal local development.