Technical memos on databases, caching, formats, and engineering tooling.
CI/CD is one of those practices where the gap between “we have CI/CD” and “our CI/CD works well” is enormous. Most teams have pipelines. …
TL;DR: Good CI/CD is fast (under 10 minutes), reliable (no flaky tests), and simple (readable pipeline …
Every few years, a new technology promises to democratize software development and make professional developers obsolete. Visual Basic did it in the 1990s. …
TL;DR: Low-code platforms are genuinely useful for internal tools, simple CRUD apps, and prototyping. They …
DevSecOps is the principle that security testing belongs in the CI/CD pipeline, not in a quarterly audit. The idea is simple. The execution is where most teams …
TL;DR: DevSecOps means security checks run automatically in CI/CD, not as a gate before release. The tools …
Diagrams are the most effective way to communicate software architecture, and the worst-maintained artifacts in most codebases. The gap exists because …
TL;DR: Mermaid is the best default for diagrams in Markdown-based docs. Excalidraw wins for collaborative …
Documentation is the most universally acknowledged problem in software development: everyone agrees it is important, almost nobody prioritizes it, and the …
TL;DR: AI tools can generate first-draft documentation that is 60-70% usable. The remaining 30-40% — …
Event streaming has become the backbone of modern application architectures. Microservices communicate through events. Analytics pipelines ingest events. …
TL;DR: Kafka is the industry standard with the deepest ecosystem. Pulsar offers multi-tenancy and tiered …
Vector databases went from niche ML infrastructure to mainstream developer tool in about eighteen months, driven entirely by the LLM boom. If you are building …
TL;DR: Vector databases store and query high-dimensional embeddings for similarity search. Dedicated vector …
The database landscape in 2026 is simultaneously more mature and more confusing than it has ever been. SQL databases have adopted features that were once NoSQL …
TL;DR: SQL databases remain the right choice for most applications. Document databases solve specific …
The microservices pendulum has swung back toward the center. After a decade of conference talks promoting microservices as the default architecture, the …
TL;DR: Start with a monolith. Extract services only when you have a specific scaling, deployment, or team …
Serverless has been production-ready for years, but the discourse around it still oscillates between “the future of everything” and “just …
TL;DR: Serverless APIs eliminate infrastructure management and scale automatically. The tradeoffs are cold …
Object storage is the unexciting infrastructure that everything depends on. Static assets, backups, data lake files, user uploads, build artifacts — if it is a …
TL;DR: S3 is the safe default with the deepest ecosystem. R2 wins on egress cost. Azure Blob integrates …
Edge computing has moved from marketing buzzword to practical infrastructure. In 2026, every major cloud and CDN provider offers some flavor of “run code …
TL;DR: Edge computing puts code close to users, cutting latency dramatically for read-heavy workloads. But …
If you have read the basics of HTTP caching — Cache-Control headers, ETags, max-age — and want to know what comes next, this note is for you. Modern web …
TL;DR: Modern caching is a layered system: browser cache, service worker, CDN edge, and origin. Getting the …
HTTP/3 has been the “next big thing” in web performance for years. By 2026, it is no longer next — it is the default transport for most major CDNs …
TL;DR: HTTP/3 eliminates head-of-line blocking at the transport layer and reduces connection setup time. …
Choosing an API architecture is one of those decisions that feels like it should be straightforward but generates surprisingly heated debates. REST has been the …
TL;DR: REST is the safe default for most public APIs. GraphQL shines when clients need flexible queries …
This note explains how to read RFCs without drowning in them, which RFCs are most relevant for web developers, and the conventions that make these documents …
TL;DR: RFCs are the source of truth for internet protocols. They're dense but navigable once you know the …
This note covers the practical use of SVG for technical diagrams in developer documentation. It walks through the advantages over raster formats, accessible SVG …
TL;DR: SVG diagrams render crisply at any size, are accessible to screen readers, and can be styled with …
This note covers the three main approaches to storing binary data alongside MySQL — inline BLOBs, external file references, and hybrid patterns — with specific …
TL;DR: BLOB columns work for small objects under 1MB. Beyond that, store on disk and keep a pointer. The …
This note covers the HTTP caching headers that matter for static sites, how CDN edge caching interacts with browser caching, and the specific configuration that …
TL;DR: Set long max-age for hashed assets, short max-age + revalidation for HTML. Let the CDN handle the …