Ideas, Experiments, and Lessons Learned
It was 2 AM when my phone buzzed. Not a notification — an alert. The kind you dread. Our main API was down. Users couldn’t log in. Payments were failing. And I was the only developer awake. The First 10 Minutes My heart rate spiked. I SSH’d into the server, ran some commands, saw nothing…
Our API was slow. Not painfully slow, but slow enough that customers complained. Response times hovered around 800ms for simple list endpoints. After some digging, I realized the database queries were the culprit. The Problem We Ignored Like most startups, we moved fast and shipped features. We added indexes here and there when things felt…
Our API was slow. Not painfully slow, but slow enough that customers complained. Response times hovered around 800ms for simple list endpoints. After some digging, I realized the database queries were the culprit. The Problem We Ignored Like most startups, we moved fast and shipped features. We added indexes here and there when things felt…
I spent three years convinced that microservices were the answer to everything. Every new project, every side project, every internal tool — I’d break it down into services. API gateway here, auth service there, notification service over there. Then I burned out. Not from the architecture itself, but from the overhead. Let me tell you…
I know what you’re thinking. “Navid, you’re insane.” And maybe you’re right. But here’s the thing — I was curious. How far can these AI coding tools actually go when you stop holding their hand? So I did something stupid. I gave an AI assistant full access to our staging environment with write permissions to…
I’ve built a lot of APIs over the years. Some were good. Most had problems I didn’t notice until users started complaining or my future self had to maintain them. Here’s what I’ve learned the hard way about API design — mistakes that cost me hours of debugging and refactoring. 1. Inconsistent Naming Conventions This…
I’ve built a lot of APIs over the years. Some were good. Most had problems I didn’t notice until users started complaining or my future self had to maintain them. Here’s what I’ve learned the hard way about API design — mistakes that cost me hours of debugging and refactoring. 1. Inconsistent Naming Conventions This…
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…