Ideas, Experiments, and Lessons Learned
Two weeks ago, my team made the call to replace our authentication system. Not because it was broken — it worked fine. But it was holding us back in ways that became obvious only when we tried to move fast. Why We Decided to Change Our original auth was a custom solution built years ago…
Two weeks ago, my team made the call to replace our authentication system. Not because it was broken — it worked fine. But it was holding us back in ways that became obvious only when we tried to move fast. Why We Decided to Change Our original auth was a custom solution built years ago…
Last month I was debugging a feature that should have taken two hours. It took two days. The code was a mess — sprawling functions, nested conditionals, and comments that hadn’t been updated since 2019. I’d had enough. I started deleting. What I Actually Deleted The original module was around 2,400 lines. After my “refactoring…
I used to reach for useEffect for everything. Data fetching? useEffect. Form validation? useEffect. Syncing state? useEffect. My components looked like chaos, and I couldn’t figure out why my code felt so hard to maintain. Then I learned something that changed how I write React: useEffect is not the answer for most problems. The Problem…
I used to reach for useEffect for everything. Data fetching? useEffect. Form validation? useEffect. Syncing state? useEffect. My components looked like chaos, and I couldn’t figure out why my code felt so hard to maintain. Then I learned something that changed how I write React: useEffect is not the answer for most problems. The Problem…
It was 2 AM when my phone started buzzing. Not once, not twice — it went full siren mode. Our main API was timing out, and the error messages were everywhere. Here’s what happened. The Setup We had a simple users table. Nothing fancy — just the usual stuff: id, email, name, created_at. We needed…
It was 2:14 AM when my phone started buzzing. Not the normal notification buzz — the panic buzz. Our main API was returning 500 errors across the board. I stumbled out of bed, opened my laptop, and saw it: our PostgreSQL database had ground to a complete halt. What Was Happening The dashboard showed CPU…
Last month, I built what I thought was a brilliant solution. We had dozens of APIs with outdated or missing documentation. So I wrote a script that used AI to scan our code and generate documentation automatically. The Setup It was simple really — feed the AI our endpoint code, request/response schemas, and let it…
It Started With a Simple Request Monday morning. Coffee in hand. I open my laptop ready to knock out some tickets. Then I see it — a Slack message from our QA team: Hey, the user profile endpoint is returning 500 errors for some users. Easy fix, I thought. Probably some null pointer or missing…
It was 2 AM when my phone started buzzing. Production server down. Database connections maxed out. Great. What Happened We had a simple feature — fetch user data from an external API and save it to our database. Sounds easy, right? The code looked something like this: for user in users: external_data = fetch_from_api(user.id) save_to_db(external_data)…