Blog

Engineering write-ups with the reasoning left in: the problem, the alternatives, the trade-offs, and what production taught us. Also available via RSS.

Mar 14, 2026AI Engineering3 min read

AI-Assisted Engineering Without Losing the Plot

A year of using AI agents on production backend code: where they genuinely compress work, where they quietly create debt, and the review discipline that makes the difference.

Nov 2, 2025Architecture3 min read

Building an Enterprise Search Engine on the JVM

How we replaced unindexed SQL filtering with a custom query DSL compiled to tenant-scoped Elasticsearch queries — the grammar, the AST, the trade-offs, and what I'd do differently.

Aug 5, 2025Distributed Systems3 min read

The Transactional Outbox, Properly

Dual-writes between your database and Kafka will lose events — quietly, rarely, and at the worst time. Here's the outbox pattern as actually implemented, including the parts the diagrams skip.

Jun 22, 2025Backend3 min read

Multi-Tenancy in Spring Boot: Choosing Your Isolation Level

Row-level, schema-per-tenant, or database-per-tenant? A decision framework from running schema-per-tenant in production, plus the async ThreadLocal bug that almost shipped.

May 10, 2025Backend2 min read

The PostgreSQL Performance Work That Actually Moved the Needle

We cut key endpoint latencies ~60% without touching hardware. A ranked list of what worked, what didn't, and how to read EXPLAIN ANALYZE without lying to yourself.