Engineering
Engineering systems, designs, and reference architectures.
Explore AI platforms, backend systems, automation workflows, cloud infrastructure, and product engineering. Each article states whether it is a case study or a reference design.
AI Engineering / Backend
Designing a Reliable AI Agent Platform: A Reference Architecture
A reference architecture for reliable agent workflows using TypeScript, Python, Redis, PostgreSQL, Docker and Kubernetes.
Backend Engineering
Cache Stampedes Need Request Coalescing, Not Longer TTLs
A practical reference architecture for request coalescing, stale serving, refresh leases, admission control, versioned cache keys, and failure testing.
Platform Engineering
Backpressure and Load Shedding Are One Overload Contract
A practical reference architecture for bounded queues, admission control, backpressure, load shedding, retry discipline, and overload testing.
Distributed Systems
Distributed Locks Need Fencing Tokens, Not Just Expiry
A practical reference architecture for leases, monotonic fencing tokens, stale-owner rejection, renewal, observability, and failure testing.
Platform Engineering
Timeouts Need End-to-End Budgets, Not Per-Hop Guesses
A practical reference architecture for propagating deadlines, cancelling obsolete work, containing retries, and operating latency budgets across service boundaries.
Backend Engineering
The Transactional Outbox Is Only Half the Reliability Story
A practical reference architecture for transactional outbox reliability: atomic writes, duplicate delivery, idempotent consumers, ordering, retries, and operations.
Backend Engineering
Idempotency Keys Need a State Machine, Not a Cache
Design retry-safe APIs with durable request identity, atomic state transitions, payload validation, concurrency control, response replay, and explicit recovery.
Backend Engineering
Kafka Retries Without Losing Control
Design Kafka consumer retries without hidden data loss: classify failures, preserve offsets and context, bound retries, protect ordering, and govern DLQ replay.
Platform Engineering
Kubernetes Graceful Shutdown Is a Traffic-Draining Protocol
Design Kubernetes shutdown as a timed protocol across endpoints, load balancers, applications, and rollouts, then test the failure windows that cause dropped requests.
Backend Engineering
Zero-Downtime Database Migrations Need Compatibility, Not Just Transactions
Design PostgreSQL schema changes as a compatibility protocol across old code, new code, backfills, constraints, rollback, and cleanup.
Backend Engineering
PostgreSQL Job Queues Need Leases, Not Just SKIP LOCKED
Design a reliable PostgreSQL job queue with atomic claims, expiring leases, fencing tokens, bounded retries, observability, and failure-injection tests.
Backend Engineering
Kafka Rebalances Are a Coordination Problem, Not Just a Timeout
A practical design guide to Kafka consumer rebalancing: ownership transfer, static membership, cooperative assignment, poll-loop safety, deployment, observability, and failure testing.