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Architecture

Notes on system design decisions — the reasoning behind the architecture, not just the diagram. Articles marked Verified are patterns drawn from production employment history; articles marked Reference are representative architectures for AI systems and commerce integrations, not tied to a specific employer.

Full Stack

2 min read
Verified

Building High-Throughput REST APIs

The handful of decisions that determine whether an API holds up under real production load: rate limiting, caching, and pagination, done deliberately.

Node.jsRESTGraphQL
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Data

2 min read
Verified

Caching Strategies with Redis

Cache-aside versus write-through, and how to choose based on how your data is actually read and written.

RedisPostgreSQL
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Distributed Systems

3 min read
Verified

Designing Async Processing with Kafka and Worker Queues

Kafka and a job queue solve overlapping but different problems. Choosing between them comes down to consumers, ordering, and replay.

KafkaBullMQNode.js
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Full Stack

3 min read
Verified

Designing Authentication with OAuth 2.0, OIDC and RBAC

How authentication, identity, and authorization fit together — and why conflating them is where most access-control bugs come from.

OAuth 2.0OIDCJWTRBAC
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Distributed Systems

3 min read
Verified

Designing Event-Driven SaaS Systems

When to reach for an event bus instead of direct service-to-service calls, and how to do it without losing the ability to reason about your system.

KafkaNode.jsPostgreSQL
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Reliability

3 min read
Verified

Designing Reliable Third-Party Integrations

Third-party APIs will fail in ways you don't control. The patterns that keep your system reliable anyway: retries, circuit breakers, and dead-letter queues.

Node.jsBullMQREST
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Cloud

3 min read
Verified

Kubernetes Deployment Strategies for SaaS

Progressive delivery on Kubernetes: why staged rollout with automated rollback beats all-at-once deploys for production SaaS.

KubernetesEKSTerraformGitHub Actions
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AI Systems

3 min read
Reference

Production AI Service Architecture

Treating an LLM provider like any other unreliable, latent, rate-limited external dependency — a reference architecture for AI-enabled services.

LLMRetrievalToolsObservability
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Data

3 min read
Verified

Scaling PostgreSQL for High-Read Workloads

A practical order of operations for scaling read-heavy PostgreSQL workloads — before you reach for a bigger instance.

PostgreSQLRedis
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Commerce

3 min read
Reference

Transaction & Payment Integration Architecture

A reference pattern for connecting commerce-oriented applications to payment and identity providers without risking duplicate charges or spoofed events.

StripePostgreSQLOAuthWebhooks
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