Ideas, Experiments, and Lessons Learned
For years, I was that developer. The one who insisted on 90% code coverage. Who would spend hours writing tests for every function, every edge case, every tiny module. I thought more tests meant better code. I was wrong. The Test Everything Mentality It started when I joined my first proper dev team. The senior…
Context I’ve been skeptical about AI coding assistants. For years, I thought they were just fancy autocomplete that would make developers lazier. But after watching my team struggle with repetitive tasks, I decided to give it a real shot. What I Used I used Claude Code and Cursor for 30 days on actual production work….
It was 2 AM when my phone rang. Not the kind of ring you ignore. The production database was frozen. Everything was frozen. And I was the on-call engineer. What Happened We had a simple migration running — adding a new column to a table with 2 million rows. Standard stuff. Or so I thought….
Three months ago, I replaced a PostgreSQL database with a single CSV file. The app got faster, simpler, and our team stopped spending weekends fixing deployment issues. The Situation We had a small internal dashboard. It tracked employee requests, managed approvals, and stored some basic analytics. Nothing fancy. But somehow, this “simple” app required: A…
The Moment I Realized Something Was Wrong I spent three hours designing a “scalable” solution for a feature that would maybe get 100 users. Built a custom caching layer. Created an elaborate state management system. Added metrics and monitoring everywhere. It took two weeks to ship. The feature worked fine. Nobody noticed any of the…
It was 2 AM when my phone buzzed. Our monitoring system was screaming — response times had spiked to 30+ seconds. Users were complaining on Twitter. And I had absolutely no idea what was happening. The Night Everything Slowed Down I pulled up my laptop, logged into the server, and my heart sank. The database…
You know that feeling when you type something into ChatGPT or Cursor, and code just appears? Like magic. No manual. No Stack Overflow scrolling. Just you, typing what you want, and boom — it works. That’s vibe coding. And I decided to try it seriously for a week. What is vibe coding? Basically, it’s writing…
It was 2 AM when my phone rang. Not the kind of call you want to get when you’re three drinks in at a friend’s birthday dinner. “The site is down,” our ops guy said. “Everything’s timing out.” What Was Happening I jumped on my laptop at the restaurant table while my friends looked at…
It was a regular Tuesday. I deployed a small change to our user API — just a minor refactor to clean up some duplicate code. Three hours later, my phone started buzzing. Customers were seeing wrong profile data. The Symptom Support tickets started flooding in: “Why is my email showing as someone else’s?” Users were…
I’ve spent more hours staring at error messages than I’d like to admit. But somewhere along the way, I realized debugging isn’t just about fixing code—it’s about thinking clearly when everything feels broken. The Frustration Is Real You know that feeling. You’ve been debugging for 3 hours. You changed something, broke something else, and now…