Articles
In-depth articles on AI, web development, cloud native, and indie hacking.
When RAG slows down, teams often focus only on the model's first token. This article uses latency budgets to break down retrieval, filtering, reranking, generation, and network overhead, with production strategies for risk-aware adaptive degradation.
Microservice integration tests are expensive because every service must be started. Contract tests verify only that API agreements remain unchanged. This article explains Pact's consumer-driven flow: consumers define expectations and generate contracts, while providers verify them to reveal before merge whether a change breaks a frontend or downstream
Changing a `role` field to a policy ID is not an ordinary mapping change. This article uses a versioned ACL schema, dual-write backfills, a coverage ledger, and negative-query proof to ensure there are no authorization gaps during migration.
When one Redis instance can no longer meet memory or throughput needs, Redis Cluster scales horizontally. This article explains its 16,384-slot and hash-tag sharding model, primary-replica replication, automatic failover, MOVED/ASK client routing, cross-slot limits, and when to choose Cluster over Sentinel.
Not every question should go to the same vector retriever. This article designs an observable query routing policy that selects keyword, semantic, structured queries, or safe refusal by intent, data freshness, permissions, and confidence.
Custom fonts improve design but can slow LCP and cause CLS when loaded poorly. This guide covers the full optimization path: font-display strategies (swap, fallback, and optional), preloading critical fonts, WOFF2 subsetting, FOUT vs. FOIT, variable fonts, fallback metrics, and a practical setup that looks good and stays fast.
Indexes with the same name can come from different corpora, parsers, or permission coverage. Treat RAG indexes as immutable artifacts, using signed manifests, digest verification, and atomic aliases for promotion and rollback.
Media Queries respond to viewport width; Container Queries respond to the parent container's width, so a component adapts (different layouts in a narrow sidebar vs. a wide main area). This article covers the principles, the @container syntax, container-type settings, browser support, and how they reshape responsive design.
Being fetched by a connector does not mean a document belongs in the production knowledge base. This article uses source registration, quarantined parsing, risk gates, and release binding to control the admission and revocation of untrusted documents.
Indexes require ongoing maintenance: they bloat, become obsolete, and consume storage. Learn to detect bloat with pgstattuple, find unused indexes through pg_stat_user_indexes, rebuild online with REINDEX CONCURRENTLY, and establish regular index health checks.
A request's cost can only be estimated at admission and known after completion. If gateways deduct independently and refund on timeout, capacity can be spent twice. This article uses reservation receipts, settlement, and expiry races to maintain rate-limit conservation.
K8s allows all Pods to communicate by default, which is a production security risk. NetworkPolicy lets you declare which Pods may communicate. This article explains ingress and egress rules, default-deny mode, and zero-trust K8s networking practices.