Notes on software engineering, system design, and the craft of building.
Async I/O and a built-in uuidv7() were the headline features. One of them quietly fixed a problem I had been working around for two years; the other did less than the benchmarks promised.
You added the index, ran the query, and it is still slow. The planner is not ignoring you — it is telling you something about your data, your column order, or your types. Here is how to read what it says.
A deploy restarted the workers mid-flight and the emails were simply gone. What it takes to build a queue where a dead process is a delay, not a data loss.
Every payment provider tells you to make your webhook idempotent. Almost nobody tells you what that actually requires — which is a decision about identity, a decision about state, and a place to put the evidence.
When a RAG system answers wrong, the model is usually not the culprit — the right chunk never made it into the context. Here is how to prove that, and what to fix once you have.
Tenant isolation held together by developer discipline will eventually fail, because it only takes one query. Here is how to push the boundary down into Postgres so forgetting stops being possible.
Generating code got cheap. Understanding it did not. Review is now the bottleneck skill, and reviewing generated code is harder than reviewing a colleague's.
