Engineering deep-dives, system design concepts, and architectural patterns.
Rate limiting with Redis Lua scripts, circuit breakers with half-open recovery, dynamic service discovery, and why I built it instead of using an off-the-shelf solution.
Implementing the closed-open-half-open state machine, isolated connection pools per upstream, and exponential backoff with jitter for idempotent requests only.
Implementing token-bucket and sliding-window-log as atomic Lua scripts, why fixed-window fails at boundaries, and how to stack multiple rate limit rules per request.
Schema-per-tenant vs shared-table tenancy, tradeoffs that actually matter, and why convenience-first architecture usually turns into future damage.
Caching is easy until invalidation turns your app into a liar. This breaks down practical TTL strategy, namespaced keys, and targeted invalidation.
Chunking strategies, embedding selection, retrieval re-ranking, and why naive RAG falls apart at scale without careful pipeline design.
Controllers, services, validation boundaries, auth layers, cache placement, and why most beginner backends become unreadable after 3 months.
Reusable UI patterns, spacing rhythm, typography hierarchy, and how to make a portfolio feel engineered instead of assembled.
Why request validation belongs at the edge, why service-layer overvalidation is a smell, and how Zod keeps contracts explicit.