Ideas, Experiments, and Lessons Learned
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…
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:…