Build better systems
Deep dives into system design, architecture patterns, and modern engineering practices.
Why 88% of AI Agent Projects Never Reach Production (and What the 12% Do Differently)
IDC and Digital Applied 2026 data show 79% of enterprises have adopted AI agents, but only 11% have them in production. This article examines the governance, audit, and architecture gaps that kill agent projects after pilot, and what the teams that ship actually build.
Designing a Circuit Breaker: Failure Detection, State Machines, and Cascading Failure Prevention in Distributed Systems
A deep dive into circuit breaker design: the three-state machine mechanics, failure detection strategies, timeout calibration, the relationship with retry policies and bulkheads, and how to choose between library-level and infrastructure-level circuit breaking.
EU AI Act Compliance for Engineering Teams: Risk Classification, Technical Documentation, and Building Audit-Ready AI Systems Before August 2026
A practical engineering guide to EU AI Act compliance before the August 2, 2026 enforcement deadline. Covers risk classification, Annex IV technical documentation, logging architecture for agent decisions, human oversight patterns, and a realistic timeline for teams starting now.
Decision Debt Is Killing Your Series A: How Missing Architecture Decision Records Cost More Than Technical Debt
Decision debt is the undocumented reasoning behind your architecture. Unlike technical debt, it compounds invisibly at every leadership transition, compliance review, and due diligence event. Here is how to name it, measure it, and retroactively fix it before it kills a deal or a new CTO.
Migrating From No-Code to Production Code: Architecture Decisions, Data Migration, and Scaling Beyond Platform Limits
A founder's guide to escaping Bubble, Webflow, or Glide. Covers the decision framework for when to migrate, how to choose your new stack, incremental migration patterns that avoid the big rewrite, data migration strategy, and production hardening.
Graceful Degradation for AI Features: Fallback Strategies, Timeout Budgets, and Keeping Your App Alive When LLMs Fail
LLM outages are not edge cases. This guide covers fallback chains across cached responses, simpler models, and rule-based logic, timeout budget allocation across multi-step pipelines, feature-level circuit breakers, and detecting quality degradation before users notice.
Designing a Customer Data Platform: Event Collection, Identity Resolution, and Unified Customer Profiles at Scale
A practical guide to the internal architecture of a customer data platform. Covers event collection SDKs, identity resolution algorithms, profile merge logic, audience segmentation, and GDPR right-to-deletion.
Designing a Data Retention and Archival System: TTL Policies, Cold Storage Tiers, and Compliance-Driven Data Lifecycle Management
Every production database grows until compliance or cost forces a rethink. This guide covers TTL policies, hot/warm/cold storage tiers with transparent query routing, GDPR/HIPAA/SOC2 retention rules, archival pipelines, and deletion that actually works.
Designing a Stock Exchange: Order Matching Engines, Order Books, and Low-Latency Trade Execution at Scale
A deep dive into stock exchange system design covering order book data structures, price-time and pro-rata matching algorithms, kernel bypass for sub-microsecond latency, multicast market data distribution, and the production challenges of deterministic replay, fault tolerance, and regulatory audit trails.
Designing a Webhook Ingestion Pipeline: Signature Verification, Idempotent Processing, and Event Routing for Multi-Provider SaaS
A practical guide to building a production webhook ingestion pipeline that handles signature verification across providers, deduplicates events, routes to internal consumers, and surfaces observability signals when a provider goes silent.
Contract-First API Development with OpenAPI: Schema-Driven Validation, Type Generation, and Client SDK Automation in TypeScript
Contract-first API development means writing the OpenAPI spec before writing a single route handler. This guide covers the full workflow: type generation with openapi-typescript, request/response validation in Hono and Next.js, mock servers for frontend teams, client SDK generation, contract testing in CI, and strategies for evolving contracts without breaking consumers.
Designing a Rate Limiter: Token Buckets, Sliding Windows, and Distributed Rate Limiting at Scale
A deep dive into rate limiting algorithms, distributed coordination with Redis, per-user and per-API-key enforcement, and the production problems most implementations ignore: race conditions, clock drift, graceful degradation, and placement in the request path.