I build software, explore AI, and study how complex systems work. Here I document what I learn, build and break along the way.
Now
A running snapshot, updated October 2026.
A billing system that has to be boring to be trusted, and a small agent I use every day.
Dutch, mostly. Some reading on system design when the commute allows.
Writing more regularly, and saying less when I am unsure.
Whether agents can be made genuinely dependable rather than just impressive.
Latest
Builds, notes and the occasional post-mortem — the short version of what happened.
Every week the same few volunteers spent two hours or more chasing sermon slides, copying Bible verses and fixing line breaks. So I built them an agent that does it on Thursday evening, for about seven cents, and still lets a person say no.
How the Sunday slides agent proves it never changed a verse, why Claude only gets to propose design changes, and how the design pass went from 50 cents to 8 cents a build.
Two Railway services, one cron, a webhook, a watchdog and a cost log. The real numbers from the Sunday slides agent's first weeks in production, including the Thursday it failed.
Selected builds
Real builds — what they do, what they run on, and the parts that broke.
A tool for hitting a message consumer with traffic and watching retries, dead letters and back-pressure in real time.
Found two retry storms before they reached production-like load.
An agent that plans and calls tools to finish a job — plus an honest account of where it lost the plot.
Handles the lookup work reliably; a person still checks the answer.
Invoices and payments modelled as events, designed so a retry never charges anyone twice.
Engineering
Longer notes, references and diagrams on the systems I work with.
Agents, LLMs, RAG and AI architecture — what I build, test and break.
Distributed systems, databases, messaging, caching and scaling.
Working references from Java, Spring, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis and Kubernetes.
Full write-ups from problem to trade-offs, with the diagrams to match.
Growth
Two things I'm practising outside of code — with the milestones and the setbacks.
Since 2025
From nodding along to holding a conversation. The plateaus, the practice that stuck, and what I still cannot say.
Since 2026
Starting with a five-minute lightning talk and working up. What the nerves do, and what actually helps.
Life
Rotterdam, road trips, coffee and the ordinary days in between.
About
I'm Aniefiok Akpan, a software engineer in the Netherlands. I build software, explore AI and study how complex systems work — and I keep the notes here: what worked, and what didn't.
Contact
Whether it's engineering, a collaboration, or something you think I should look at — I'd like to hear about it.
Get in touch
