Writing
Patterns, incidents, and small lessons from building and operating backend systems.
Every stage runs against a time budget and hands back a cursor. Getting that right was harder than it sounds — including one invariant that, read literally, produces an infinite queue.
8 min read →async def doesn't make your code fast by itself. A tour of the FastAPI patterns that actually matter, with the bad version next to the good one.
9 min read →A driver-based search layer for Django and SQLAlchemy, inspired by Laravel Scout. Add a mixin, and your index stays in sync without polling or manual bookkeeping.
5 min read →A few patterns I keep coming back to when background jobs start piling up and retries get out of hand.
6 min read →Long-running workers hold onto stale code and leaking memory. Here's the restart cadence that's actually kept incidents away.
5 min read →EXPLAIN ANALYZE told me the truth. The index was correct — the query just wasn't written to reach for it.
4 min read →