Ideas, Experiments, and Lessons Learned
Three hours. That’s how long I stared at my screen, questioning my career choices, doubting everything I knew about programming. And you know what the problem was? A single character. A missing letter. A typo. The Scene It was a Friday afternoon. Simple task — fetch some data from an API, process it, save to…
The Bug That Made Me Feel Stupid Three hours. That’s how long I stared at my screen, questioning my career choices, before finding the fix. One line. That’s all it took. Let me tell you what happened. What I Was Building I was working on a simple API endpoint that fetched user data from our…
It happened on a Tuesday afternoon I was 23 years old, fresh out of my first startup, and confident. Too confident. We had a small team — me, a frontend dev, and the founder. I was handling everything backend, and honestly, I thought I had it figured out. We were migrating our PostgreSQL database to…
It was 2 AM. I was half-asleep, running what I thought was a local database cleanup script. I was wrong. I was connected to production. The Mistake I had a simple script to delete old test records from my local database. Something like: DELETE FROM users WHERE created_at < '2024-01-01' AND environment = 'test'; The...
It was 2 AM when my phone rang. Our production server was down for the third time that week. I pulled up the logs, checked the metrics, and saw the same pattern: memory usage climbing steadily until the OOM killer stepped in and terminated our Node.js process. The Symptoms Let me paint the picture: Restarted…
It was 2 AM. My phone buzzed. Our monitoring system was screaming. I had just run a migration script that was supposed to clean up old records. Instead, it deleted half our user table. Here is what happened and what I learned. The Setup We had a table with inactive users. The business wanted to…
I still remember my first on-call shift. It was a Friday night, I was three drinks in, and my phone started buzzing. Production database was down. My heart rate spiked. I had no idea what to do. That’s when I realized — nobody teaches you this stuff. You learn to code. You learn algorithms. But…
I decided to build a real API over a weekend. Not a tutorial. Not a toy project. Something I’d actually use in production later. Here’s what happened. The Goal I needed an API for a small internal tool at work. Nothing fancy — just a way to fetch, create, and update customer records. I told…
I decided to build a real API over a weekend. Not a tutorial. Not a toy project. Something I’d actually use in production later. Here’s what happened. The Goal I needed an API for a small internal tool at work. Nothing fancy — just a way to fetch, create, and update customer records. I told…
I used to Dockerize everything. Every project, every service, every side hustle — straight into a Dockerfile. It felt right. “Works on my machine” solved, reproducible environments, production parity. What could go wrong? Turns out, a lot. At least for local development. The Docker Desktop Tax Docker Desktop is hungry. On my MacBook, it easily…