Writing

Essays on systems, data, AI engineering, and the decisions behind software that has to keep working.

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Writing

Essays for the part after the demo works.

Field notes on agents, data systems, contracts, interfaces, and the production decisions that rarely fit in a tutorial.

Latest Seven Checks for Systems That Look Correct

A May–September retrospective reading path through data correctness, Kafka, RAG, caching, MCP authorization and evaluation, with refreshed series chapters.

Seven checks connecting refreshed data, Kafka and AI series.
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Entries marked “Retrospective” fill the May–September 2026 reading sequence. They were published on September 17, 2026; their archive dates are editorial placements. Start with the reading guide.

2026

Sep
Seven Checks for Systems That Look Correct Retrospective · Sep 6 systemsAI
Aug
95% Agreement, Zero Failures Caught: Testing Your LLM Judge Retrospective · Aug 23 AIevaluation Your MCP Server Is an Authorization Boundary Retrospective · Aug 9 MCPsecurity
Jul
Your Cache Hit Rate Is Not Your Token Savings Retrospective · Jul 26 AIcost Kafka Rebalancing Changed. Did Your Consumer Configuration? Retrospective · Jul 12 Kafkaoperations
Jun
Your RAG Works Until You Add a Tenant Filter Retrospective · Jun 28 RAGsearch Kafka Exactly-Once Stops at the Database Boundary Retrospective · Jun 14 Kafkadistributed-systems
May
Your Historical Data Knows the Future Retrospective · May 31 dataSQL Flue Under the Hood: Why This Agent Harness Holds AIagents The Cost of Context: Measure the Work, Not Just the Window AIcontext-windows The Model Updated. Now What? AIproduction The Invisible Technical Debt of AI Systems AItechnical-debt
Apr
Manager / Coordinator / Agent: A Multi-Agent Topology That Survives Real Workloads AIagents When Your AI System Breaks at 3am AIdebugging
Mar
Encoding the Senior Engineer in the Room: A Design Memo for Tacit Skills AIclaude-code
Feb
Akka Cluster Sharding vs a Consistent-Hash Ring: What You Trade Away distributed-systemsakka
Jan
The New Rules of Shipping in the AI Era shippingai The Missing Layer: Why AI Conversations Need Structure AIarchitecture

2025

Dec
Context at AI Speed AIdevelopment The Alien Tool AIdevelopment Production Agents: From Demo to Deployment ai-engineeringagents The Agent Loop Is a Lie AIagents AI Engineering Fundamentals: From Tokens to Agents ai-engineeringgen-ai API-Driven UI Configuration: Stop Hardcoding Your Dashboard sane-fullstackapi-design Configuration-Driven React Components: One Component, Many Use Cases sane-fullstackreact 3-Tier Design Token Architecture: From Figma to Themes sane-fullstackdesign-tokens BFF Pattern with Spring Boot and Specmatic: Contract-First Backend sane-fullstackbff Contract-First Frontend: Stop Letting Your Mocks Lie to You sane-fullstackspecmatic
Nov
Design Pattern - Cascading Credential Resolution design-patternssecurity Monkey-Patching and Annotation-Driven AOP in Python - Learning from FastAPI, Pydantic, and Requests pythondesign-patterns Building AI-First Documentation Systems - A Modern Approach to Project Knowledge documentationai-agents Building a Modern Stock Analysis System with Vortex, DuckDB, and Apache Arrow vortexduckdb Why CLIs matter in AI engineering apicli
Sep
Smart Migration System with Flyway Integration - Design and Implementation flywaydatabase-migrations

2024

Sep
Implementing Scalable Search Functionality - Design & Technical Blueprint searcharchitecture TIL- Converting Parquet Files to Vespa Documents parquetvespa
Aug
TIL - How to List All Users with Pagination Using Clerk in Go ClerkTIL TIL - Battling Database Duplicates - A Perspective on Data Integrity DatabasesTIL