Writing

Engineering notes from real builds.

Architecture decisions, performance work and the trade-offs behind them — written while the details were still fresh.

18articles·43topics

Latest

AI EngineeringJul 22, 2026

Multi-Agent Workflows with LangGraph: State, Nodes and Knowing When Not To

Agent frameworks make it easy to build systems you can't debug. LangGraph's graph model fixes that — here is how state, nodes, conditional edges and checkpointing actually fit together.

#langgraph
#ai
#agents
#python
#architecture

4 min1

17 articles

AI EngineeringJul 17, 2026

Building RAG Systems That Don't Hallucinate

Most RAG failures are retrieval failures wearing a generation costume. Chunking, hybrid search, reranking, grounded prompting and an evaluation loop that tells you which stage is actually broken.

#rag
#ai
#langchain

4 min0

FrontendJul 11, 2026

TypeScript Patterns That Actually Pay Off in React Codebases

Not the clever type gymnastics — the handful of patterns that genuinely stop bugs: discriminated unions, satisfies, branded types, and deleting your enums.

#typescript
#react
#frontend

3 min0

SecurityJul 3, 2026

Refresh Token Rotation, Reuse Detection and the Race You Forgot

Short access tokens need a refresh flow, and a naive one is worse than no rotation at all. Here is the full design — rotation, reuse detection, family revocation, and the concurrency bug that logs everyone out.

#authentication
#security
#nodejs

4 min0

SecurityJun 25, 2026

JWT Authentication in Node.js, Explained Properly

What a JWT actually is, why the signature matters more than the payload, and the concrete decisions — storage, expiry, algorithm, revocation — that separate a working login from a safe one.

#jwt
#authentication
#nodejs

4 min12

BackendJun 20, 2026

Designing REST APIs That Age Well

The design choices you make in week one decide whether year two is painful. Pagination, error shapes, idempotency, versioning and the additive-change rule that keeps clients from breaking.

#api
#rest
#nodejs

4 min0

PerformanceJun 14, 2026

Core Web Vitals for React Developers: LCP, INP and CLS

Three metrics, three distinct failure modes, three sets of fixes. What each one actually measures, how to find the culprit in your own app, and the changes that moved the numbers for me.

#performance
#react
#nextjs

3 min0

SecurityJun 2, 2026

Hardening a Node.js REST API: The Checklist I Actually Use

Validation, rate limiting, headers, NoSQL injection, error leakage and CORS. Nine concrete fixes that take an afternoon and remove most of the ways a public API gets abused.

#nodejs
#express
#security

3 min0

DevOpsMay 30, 2026

Dockerizing a MERN App for Production Without the 1.2 GB Image

Multi-stage builds, non-root users, real health checks and the layer-caching trick that takes rebuilds from four minutes to twenty seconds.

#docker
#devops
#nodejs

3 min0

BackendMay 21, 2026

Realtime Features with Socket.IO That Survive a Second Server

Socket.IO is easy until you scale past one process, refresh the page, or lose the network. Here is the architecture I use — rooms, an adapter, acknowledgements and reconnect handling.

#nodejs
#websockets
#socketio

3 min0

FrontendMay 9, 2026

Next.js Caching, Explained Without the Hand-Waving

Four caches, different lifetimes, one confusing surface. Here is what each layer actually does, how to see which one served your page, and how to invalidate precisely instead of reaching for force-dynamic.

#nextjs
#caching
#performance

3 min2

DatabasesApr 30, 2026

Stop Guessing at MongoDB Performance: Read the Explain Plan

A slow query is not a mystery. explain('executionStats') tells you exactly what happened — here is how to read it, the four numbers that matter, and the index fixes each symptom points to.

#mongodb
#performance
#indexing

3 min0

DatabasesApr 19, 2026

MongoDB Schema Design: When to Embed and When to Reference

The 16 MB document limit is not the interesting constraint. Here is the decision framework I use for embedding vs referencing, with the read and write patterns that should actually drive the call.

#mongodb
#database
#schema design

4 min0

ArchitectureApr 8, 2026

React Server Components: A Practical Mental Model

Server Components are not 'SSR with extra steps'. Here is the mental model that finally made the client/server boundary obvious — and the rules I follow when deciding where a component belongs.