Articles
In-depth articles on AI, web development, cloud native, and indie hacking.
A table's ability to time travel does not mean old snapshots remain recoverable forever. This article binds reader references, snapshot expiration, orphan-file cleanup, and legal holds to the same generation, then uses cold recovery to prove that metadata and data files were not reclaimed prematurely.
Some logic is more efficient in the database, including automatic auditing, cascading updates, and data validation. But overusing triggers makes behavior implicit and hard to debug. This article explains how PostgreSQL triggers and functions work, when to use them, when not to, and why triggers demand restraint.
Fitting context into the window does not make the message sequence valid. This article binds roles, tool calls/results, serialized requests, and streaming blocks into one dispatch manifest so partial tool arguments or stale streams cannot leak into the next turn.
Choosing between SSE and WebSocket for server push? This article explains their fundamental differences, ideal use cases, proxy and firewall compatibility, connection limits, and provides clear guidance on when to use each.
Ad hoc truncation after a context overflow turns a cost problem into an incorrect answer. This article makes context assembly a server-side admission protocol, controlling each call through bucketed reservations, a deterministic degradation ladder, and settlement metrics.
Sending emails, generating reports, and processing uploads time out inside a request—move them to a background queue. This article covers the queue core (enqueue/worker/retry/monitoring), tech selection (BullMQ/Sidekiq/Celery), delayed and scheduled jobs, idempotency, and how to decide “what should be async.”
Production LLM gateways cannot rely on round-robin routing alone. This article presents an auditable routing policy jointly driven by capability constraints, data boundaries, latency budgets, cost caps, health status, and fallback order.
Read-heavy and write-light? Add read replicas to spread reads across databases while the primary handles writes. This article covers primary-replica architecture, application- and proxy-level routing, replication-lag consistency traps, and when read replicas are or are not appropriate.
Correlation between a Judge and human ratings does not mean it can compare new models reliably. This article turns blinded anchors, position swaps, style counterfactuals, calibration mappings, and Judge releases into a reproducible admission contract.
Context is easy to use, but when its value changes, every consumer rerenders. In high-frequency scenarios, that is a performance killer. This article explains Context rerendering, why putting all state into one Context is an anti-pattern, how to split it, and when to switch to Zustand.
A local service starting successfully does not mean database migrations, authorization scopes, and messaging topics are ready. This article uses versioned capability probes, stability windows, and failure classification to turn "wait and refresh" into a verifiable, reversible development startup gate.
Locks preserve correctness during concurrent writes, but poor locking causes delays and deadlocks. This article explains PostgreSQL row, table, and advisory locks, automatic deadlock detection, concurrency control with SELECT FOR UPDATE, and ways to reduce contention through short transactions, consistent lock ordering, and optimistic locking.