Ideas, Experiments, and Lessons Learned
Six months ago, I decided to go all-in on AI coding assistants. Not just for fun — I used them on real production projects, real deadlines, and real bugs. No benchmarks, no marketing fluff. Just my honest experience as a backend developer. What I Used I tested three main tools across different scenarios: GitHub Copilot…
Three days. That’s how long I stared at my screen, questioning my career choice, doubting everything I knew about coding. And the fix? One line. One stupid line that I missed a hundred times. The Problem Started Simple We had a bug in our payment system. Users were getting charged twice. Not always — just…
Three hours. That’s how long I stared at logs, checked configurations, and questioned my entire career before someone asked the obvious question: “Which server are you actually looking at?” I wasn’t working on anything fancy. Just a simple API endpoint that was returning 500 errors in production. Classic problem, right? Time to dig in. The…
Three days. Forty-two hours of staring at code. Multiple panic-induced Slack messages to my teammate. And it turned out the problem was nowhere near where I was looking. Here’s what happened. The Problem We had a production issue. Users were reporting that their data wasn’t saving. The error message was vague: “Something went wrong.” Classic….
Three days. That’s how long I stared at the same error message before realizing I had been fighting a ghost. It started like any other Tuesday. I was working on a feature that synced user data between our main app and a third-party service. Everything looked correct in the code. The API was returning 200…
The Microservices Trap I used to think microservices were the answer to everything. Small services,独立部署, easy to scale — what could go wrong? I pushed for microservices on three different projects in my first few years as a backend developer. Now I look back and realize: for small projects, it was overkill. Big time. What…
Here’s a story about the time I over-engineered a simple problem and learned a hard lesson about message queues. What Happened It was 2022. I had an API endpoint that processed user uploads and sent confirmation emails. The endpoint was slow – sometimes timing out when thousands of users uploaded at once. My first thought:…
I remember this one clearly. We had an endpoint that was getting slower by the day. At first, it took 200ms. Then 500ms. Then over 2 seconds. Users started complaining. The Symptoms The API was simple — fetch a list of orders with user details. Nothing fancy. But as the database grew, response times exploded….
Four hours. That’s how long I stared at my screen, questioning my career choices, debug logs flooding my terminal, and genuinely considering whether I should just become a farmer. The bug? A simple API endpoint returning 500 errors in production. Nothing special. Just another day in the life of a backend developer. What Happened It…
Tuesday afternoon. I’m feeling good. Deploy went smooth, tests passed, coffee in hand. Then the alerts start rolling in. The Problem Users can’t login. Not all users, but enough to trigger panic. Error logs show something about JWT tokens. Fine. I’ve seen this before. I open my terminal. Check the logs. Nothing obvious. I dig…