Ideas, Experiments, and Lessons Learned
Let me be honest — I used to think error handling was boring. Just wrap things in try-catch and move on, right? Wrong. That mindset cost us hours of debugging at 2 AM. After dealing with enough production fires, I started collecting patterns that actually work. These aren’t theoretical best practices — they’re the things…
Let me be honest — I used to think error handling was boring. Just wrap things in try-catch and move on, right? Wrong. That mindset cost us hours of debugging at 2 AM. After dealing with enough production fires, I started collecting patterns that actually work. These aren’t theoretical best practices — they’re the things…
My microservices origin story I used to roll my eyes every time someone mentioned microservices. “Just use a monolith,” I’d say. “You’re overcomplicating things.” And for years, I was right. Most startups don’t need microservices. They need working features. But then my side project grew. What started as a simple REST API became something bigger….
For years, I wrapped everything in try-catch blocks. Every function, every API call, every database query. I thought that’s what defensive programming looked like. I was wrong. The Problem with Catching Everything When you catch exceptions at every level, you lose context. You mask real errors. You make debugging a nightmare because you never know…
For years, I wrapped everything in try-catch blocks. Every function, every API call, every database query. I thought that’s what defensive programming looked like. I was wrong. The Problem with Catching Everything When you catch exceptions at every level, you lose context. You mask real errors. You make debugging a nightmare because you never know…
I’ll be honest — I used to think context switching wasn’t a big deal. “Just switch tasks,” I’d tell myself. How hard can it be? Then I looked at my calendar and realized I’d jumped between 7 different projects in a single day. And accomplished basically nothing. What Context Switching Actually Costs Here’s the thing…
Three hours. That’s how long I stared at my screen, questioning my career choices, doubting everything I knew about programming. And the culprit? A single character typo. The Setup I was building a simple API endpoint. Should’ve taken 20 minutes. But something wasn’t working. The response kept returning null instead of the expected data. I…
Why I Ditched the Library For years, I used Auth0, Firebase Auth, and Passport.js without thinking twice. They handled the hard stuff — token management, security patches, OAuth flows. Why reinvent the wheel? Then I joined a startup with a tight budget and a weird requirement: we needed custom auth logic that didn’t fit any…
Why I Ditched the Library For years, I used Auth0, Firebase Auth, and Passport.js without thinking twice. They handled the hard stuff — token management, security patches, OAuth flows. Why reinvent the wheel? Then I joined a startup with a tight budget and a weird requirement: we needed custom auth logic that didn’t fit any…
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…