Blog
Long-form, code-heavy writing on software engineering, AI/LLM, payments and system design.
External IDs as the one crucial decision, the logout() that prevents privacy incidents, permission etiquette that triples opt-ins, REST sends with collapse keys, and the delivery feedback loop everyone skips.
Sockets are tenants, not confetti: the pub/sub backplane, stateless nodes and rolling drains, the reconnect stampede and its jittered cure, missed-message recovery by data shape, and the capacity cliffs to test first.
One protocol, three servers, one reversible decision: what managed Pusher buys, what Reverb and Soketi cost to operate, and the connection-count crossover math that settles it.
Events with explicit payloads on a dedicated queue, channel auth done like tenant isolation, Echo on the client — and the reconnect-reconcile pattern that survives tunnels, sleeps and deploys.
The honest tour by operational weight: Postgres tsvector with trigrams, the search-box specialists with superb typo tolerance, and the real signals that justify the heavyweight cluster.
Shard sizing between the two failure modes, the 50%/30GB heap rules and why the other half matters, master quorum and watermarks, ILM tiering for log workloads, and snapshots you have actually restored.
Scout for the write path, raw DSL for the read path: denormalized documents, cascade updates, drift reconciliation, filter-vs-must, hydration without N+1, and the alias pattern from day one.
The three machines under the API: inverted indexes (why search is fast and updates are weird), analyzers with a Turkish-aware example, permanent mappings, and BM25 relevance in one honest paragraph.
The minimal correct lock and the four bugs hiding in simpler versions, fencing tokens for the expiry race, Redlock in two fair paragraphs, and the lock-free designs that beat locking entirely.
Organized by the incident it prevents: maxmemory and eviction policies, AOF vs RDB persistence blends, Sentinel vs Cluster reality, the fork-memory trap and the five-number dashboard.
