Field notes from production.
Essays on backend engineering, system design, and the trade-offs that actually matter. No tutorials. No hot takes.
Designing Idempotent Payment APIs
How to prevent duplicate charges in distributed systems — the contract, the storage, and the failure modes I learned at scale.
Building a Distributed Rate Limiter with Redis
Sliding window vs fixed window, why I chose sorted sets, and how the rate limiter at Bolt protected a 10K-RPS platform.
Circuit Breakers, Done Right
Most circuit breakers protect nothing. Here's how to place them, tune them, and avoid the worst failure mode — circuit-breaker-induced outages.
Scaling Node.js APIs to Handle Real Traffic
The non-obvious bottlenecks that hit Node.js services at 10K RPS, and the patterns that actually fix them.
The Boolean Flag Graveyard: Modelling Domains with State Machines
If your entity has four boolean flags, you probably have a state machine in disguise — and it's already bleeding bugs.
Have a system that needs to scale — or stop breaking?
I work with a small number of teams each month on architecture reviews, scaling, and hands-on backend engineering. If that sounds like you, let's talk.