Notes on system design, engineering decisions, and lessons learned building real products. Some are polished evergreen content, others are ideas still taking shape.
The best line of code is the one you never write. The second best is the one you delete. In an era where code is cheap, clarity is expensive. That is where real engineering lives.
Caching can be a tricky topic, especially when pages don’t update the way you expect. I recently ran into a situation on my /writing page where new articles would not appear immediately, even though individual posts showed up instantly. Diving into Next.js caching taught me a lot, and I want to share what I learned so others can avoid the same confusion
Like physical systems, software naturally moves toward disorder unless energy is applied to keep it organized. In codebases, this disorder appears gradually and often quietly.
Today’s reminder that MySQL will happily let you believe you’re doing everything “right” right up until it doesn’t.
The shorter the distance between writing code and seeing its effects in production, the faster teams learn. DevOps optimizes for learning speed.
Tests are often justified using coverage metrics. Coverage is a weak proxy for what tests actually provide: confidence.