Ten months of Dutch, honestly assessed
What moved quickly, what has not moved at all, and the practice habits that survive a busy week.
Aniefiok Akpan: Software Engineer. Builder. Learner.
I build software, explore AI, and study how complex systems work. Here I document what I learn, build and break along the way.
Now
What I'm focused on
A running snapshot, updated October 2026.
Building
A billing system that has to be boring to be trusted, and a small agent I use every day.
Learning
Dutch, mostly. Some reading on system design when the commute allows.
Improving
Writing more regularly, and saying less when I am unsure.
Exploring
Whether agents can be made genuinely dependable rather than just impressive.
Latest
Recent entries
Builds, notes and the occasional post-mortem — the short version of what happened.
Idempotent consumers, without the ceremony
What actually happens when the same message arrives twice, and the smallest set of changes that makes a consumer safe to retry.
Rebuilding the billing flow as events
Why the second version of an event-driven design is usually the simpler one, and the retry question that decided the whole shape.
Selected builds
Things I've built
Real builds — what they do, what they run on, and the parts that broke.
RabbitMQ Consumer Test Console
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.
My First AI Agent
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.
Event-Driven Billing System
Invoices and payments modelled as events, designed so a retry never charges anyone twice.
Engineering
Where the depth lives
Longer notes, references and diagrams on the systems I work with.
AI
Agents, LLMs, RAG and AI architecture — what I build, test and break.
System Design
Distributed systems, databases, messaging, caching and scaling.
Code & Snippets
Working references from Java, Spring, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis and Kubernetes.
Architecture Lab
Full write-ups from problem to trade-offs, with the diagrams to match.
Growth
Growing in public
Two things I'm practising outside of code — with the milestones and the setbacks.
Since 2025
Dutch
Learning Dutch from scratch in the Netherlands — classes, daily practice, and the awkward middle.
Since 2026
Public Speaking
From writing things down to standing in front of a room — talks, nerves and feedback.
Life
Life, mostly in pictures
Rotterdam, road trips, coffee and the ordinary days in between.
Early morning by the Maas
A road trip north, past Utrecht
Coffee, the slow kind
A summer evening on a terrace
Winter light in the city
A quiet weekend, somewhere green
About
Learning, building and documenting along the way.
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
Let's talk
Whether it's engineering, a collaboration, or something you think I should look at — I'd like to hear about it.
Get in touch