Ideas, Experiments, and Lessons Learned
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…
How It Started As a backend developer, I used to treat every side project like a potential unicorn startup. I’d spin up a microservice architecture, integrate a message broker, add caching layers, and set up CI/CD pipelines — for a project that might never see a production user. It wasn’t just excitement; it was a…
The Early Days of Over-Engineering When I first started building backend systems, I fell in love with architecture diagrams. Hexagonal design, CQRS, event sourcing—you name it, I tried to fit it into every project I touched. It made me feel like I was building something truly scalable and elegant. But in reality, I was creating…
I’ve been revisiting some of my older codebases lately, and something keeps hitting me: most of the problems I solved didn’t need to be solved at all. Looking back at thousands of lines I once thought were genius architecture, I now see complexity that actively hurt the systems I was building. The Engineering Ego Trap…
I’ve been revisiting some of my older codebases lately, and something keeps hitting me: most of the problems I solved didn’t need to be solved at all. Looking back at thousands of lines I once thought were genius architecture, I now see complexity that actively hurt the systems I was building. The Engineering Ego Trap…
Rethinking What ‘MVP’ Even Means For years, I bought into the traditional interpretation of an MVP — a quick, stripped-down version of the product meant to validate the idea. Build it fast, ship it, collect data, iterate. It sounds great in theory, but in practice, I found myself building things that looked like half-baked products…
How It All Started For years, I fell into the classic trap of over-engineering my backend APIs. Every project began with ambition: perfect abstractions, layered architecture, and all the design patterns I had recently read about. It looked stunning in theory, but in practice — the complexity became a nightmare. It wasn’t that these patterns…
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