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Where the depth lives

Notes from building backend systems: what I designed, what broke, and the reasoning I wish I had written down the first time.

Topics

Four threads I keep pulling on

Not tutorials. Working notes: what I tried, what it cost, and what I would tell myself before starting.

  • AI

    Agents, LLMs, RAG and AI architecture — what I build, test and break.

    6 notes

  • System Design

    Distributed systems, databases, messaging, caching and scaling.

    9 notes

  • Code & Snippets

    Working references from Java, Spring, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis and Kubernetes.

    14 snippets

  • Architecture Lab

    Full write-ups from problem to trade-offs, with the diagrams to match.

    2 entries

Latest

Recent engineering notes

Newest first. Some are finished thoughts, others are still moving.

  1. Article, , 6 min read

    Indexes I added, then removed

    Three index changes that looked obvious in review and cost more than they saved once real traffic arrived.

    • Databases
    • PostgreSQL
  2. System design, , 8 min read

    Sharding vs partitioning

    Two words used interchangeably in meetings, and the operational difference that makes them not the same thing at all.

    • Databases
    • Distributed systems

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Have a system worth arguing about?

I am always up for a conversation about architecture, trade-offs, or a bug that refuses to die.

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