Real-time vs eventual consistency: how it actually shows up in UX
Eventual consistency is unavoidable in a distributed system, but how it surfaces to users is a choice. Read-your-writes, session consistency, and optimistic…
How to write an incident postmortem that actually changes your system
A postmortem isn't paperwork, it's a learning tool. How to structure a good one, what questions to ask, how to keep the…
Lazy loading: when native beats IntersectionObserver, and when it doesn’t
Is native loading=lazy enough in modern browsers, or do you still need a custom IntersectionObserver implementation? A practical comparison from three projects.
Webhook vs polling: the real trade-offs and the hybrid that actually works
Arguing webhook versus polling is asking the wrong question. When is each the right fit, and when do you need to run…
Sign in with Apple: mandatory, deceptively easy to get wrong
Under App Store Guideline 4.8, any iOS app that offers third-party login has to offer Sign in with Apple too. Practical notes…
Six design principles behind batch pipelines that actually survive production
Shared patterns from three projects where I built reporting, data migration, and nightly aggregation pipelines. Chunking, checkpoints, retry discipline, idempotency.
Designing on-call rotation: from solo developer to a real team
I was solo and on-call 24/7 for 5 years. Once the team grew, building a healthy rotation became its own discipline. Thoughts…
Image optimization that actually moves LCP: WebP, AVIF, and responsive images
On one e-commerce project, 70% of the page weight was images. Moving to WebP, trying AVIF, and tightening srcset discipline cut LCP…
gRPC vs REST: when each one actually makes sense
I moved to gRPC on microservice projects and stayed on REST for monoliths. A side-by-side comparison with the decision criteria that tell…
Live Activities and Dynamic Island: lessons from 2 production apps
Live Activities shipped with iOS 16, the Dynamic Island with the iPhone 14 Pro. Here are the ActivityKit patterns I picked up…
5 things I missed while scaling background job queues
Across Redis + BullMQ, RabbitMQ, and SQS, I've relearned the same 5 lessons about scaling job queues: poison messages, retry storms, priority…
Retrospectives that solve problems, not fill in forms
For many teams, the retrospective has become a 30-minute formality. I'm sharing the structure, facilitation techniques, and action-item discipline that turn it…