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Opinionated engineering notes—security, scalability, correctness, and the interfaces between humans and machines. No listicles—just explanations you can reuse in prod and in interviews.

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Security

May 7, 20268 min read

Hashing vs Encryption vs Encoding — The Differences Developers Must Understand

A production-minded map of encoding, hashing, and encryption—salts, passwords, JWTs, Base64 myths, interview answers, and the mistakes reviewers catch.

cryptographypasswordsJWTbackend

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Systems
May 5, 20262 min read
Distributed systems basics adults revisit under pressure
Partial failures, clock lies, consensus tradeoffs, idempotency at money boundaries, and load shedding vocabulary operators actually recognize.
distributed-systemsreliabilityconsensusfallacies
Infrastructure
May 1, 20262 min read
Docker networking for engineers who resent memorizing buzzwords
Bridge overlays, NAT and published ports, embedded DNS versus external discovery, and debugging paths beyond restart theater.
DockerKubernetesnetworkingobservability
Platforms
April 25, 20262 min read
Edge runtime explained — locality, isolation, and the limits of v8 snippets
What shifts when handlers run closer to users: cold starts, memory ceilings, cryptography constraints, and why edge does not magically delete physics.
EdgelatencyNext.jsreliability
Systems
April 18, 20262 min read
Event-driven architecture without losing operational discipline
Outboxes versus brittle dual-writes, idempotent consumers, poison queues, and drawing lines between choreography and orchestration.
messagingreliabilitysagasobservability
Performance
April 10, 20262 min read
Caching strategies that survive invalidation reality
TTL alone is not a design. Layer CDN, proxy, application, and data caches with explicit ownership of staleness budgets and measurable hit quality.
cachingRedisCDNstaleness
Security
April 2, 20262 min read
JWT authentication without mythology — rotations, revocation, and session ergonomics
Symmetric versus asymmetric verification, JWKS fleets, leaky storage pitfalls, and when opaque cookies outperform bearer tokens.
JWTsessionsOAuthAPI design
Frontend architecture
March 25, 20262 min read
Server Actions in Next.js — boundaries, security contracts, and cache semantics
What crosses the network, how Actions relate to RPC ergonomics over POST, and the checklist for parity with disciplined API handlers.
Next.jsReactsecurityforms
Networking
March 18, 20262 min read
WebSockets vs HTTP — connection economics, backpressure, and when streaming wins
Framing the transport choice as an operations problem: fan-out, heartbeats, scaling stateful sockets, and falling back to SSE or polling without shame.
WebSocketHTTP/2SSEscaling
Data
March 12, 20263 min read
Database indexing beyond B-trees — selectivity, partial indexes, and write amplification
How query planners pick indexes, when covering indexes beat heap fetches, and the operational cost every extra index hides.
PostgreSQLperformancequery-plansstorage

Hashing vs Encryption vs Encoding — The Differences Developers Must Understand

All posts

Distributed systems basics adults revisit under pressure

Docker networking for engineers who resent memorizing buzzwords

Edge runtime explained — locality, isolation, and the limits of v8 snippets

Event-driven architecture without losing operational discipline

Caching strategies that survive invalidation reality

JWT authentication without mythology — rotations, revocation, and session ergonomics

Server Actions in Next.js — boundaries, security contracts, and cache semantics

WebSockets vs HTTP — connection economics, backpressure, and when streaming wins

Database indexing beyond B-trees — selectivity, partial indexes, and write amplification