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Aniefiok Akpan

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.

3 notes

  1. System design, , 9 min read

    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.

    • Messaging
    • Kafka
    • PostgreSQL

  2. System design, , 11 min read

    RabbitMQ vs Kafka

    Not a benchmark. A comparison of the questions each one makes you answer: about ordering, replay, consumers and who owns the offset.

    • Messaging
    • Kafka
    • RabbitMQ

  3. System design, , 14 min read

    Designing a notification system

    Fan-out, user preferences and the retry budget — sketched end to end before building any of it.

    • Messaging
    • Distributed systems

Next

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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