AI & Machine Learning
How LLMs Work: A Mental Model for Engineers
What is actually happening inside a large language model - tokens, attention, context windows, and why these systems behave the way they do.
All posts
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Testing
Writing Unit Tests That Actually Catch Bugs
What separates a unit test that catches real regressions from one that only verifies your test setup - and how to write tests that stay useful as code changes.
Testing
The Testing Pyramid: Why Balance Matters More Than Coverage
What unit, integration, and end-to-end tests are actually good for, and how to find the right mix so your test suite catches real bugs without being a maintenance burden.
Performance
Profile First, Optimize Second
Why guessing at performance bottlenecks wastes time, and how to use profiling tools to find what actually needs fixing before you touch the code.
Security
OWASP Top 10: The Vulnerabilities That Keep Coming Back
A practical look at the most common web application vulnerabilities, what actually causes them, and the patterns that consistently prevent them.
Observability
Metrics: What to Measure and What to Ignore
How to pick the right metrics for your service, understand the different metric types, and avoid the trap of measuring everything.
Infrastructure
Docker from Scratch: Images, Containers, and Registries
What Docker actually is under the hood - from a Dockerfile to a running container, and where registries fit in.
Performance
Caching Strategies: Where to Cache and What to Invalidate
Caches speed things up until they serve stale data. Understanding the tradeoffs at each caching layer - and how invalidation actually works - is what keeps them from becoming bugs.
Databases
Indexes: How They Work, When They Help, When They Hurt
An index is a tradeoff - faster reads at the cost of slower writes and more storage. Knowing how B-trees work and how the planner uses them tells you when that tradeoff is worth making.
Security
Cryptography Basics Every Developer Should Know
You don't need to implement cryptography - you need to understand it well enough to use the right tool, avoid the wrong one, and not accidentally break your own security.
Infrastructure
Linux for Developers Who Aren't Sysadmins
You don't need to be a sysadmin to be effective on Linux - you need to understand processes, file descriptors, permissions, and signals well enough to debug what goes wrong in production.
Observability
Logging That's Actually Useful: Structured Logs and Log Levels
A log that's hard to search is just noise. Structured logging and proper log levels are what separate observability from disk pollution.