Pagination looks like the least interesting problem in backend engineering — until the page that took 30 ms at depth
Continue readingPagination at Depth: Why OFFSET Falls Over and How to Build Cursors That Don’t
Most Go developers can recite one fact about the garbage collector: it exists, and it mostly works. That is usually
Continue readingGo’s Garbage Collector: Tricolor Marks, Write Barriers, and the Green Tea Era
Every API that survives long enough faces the same moment: a requirement lands that cannot be expressed as an additive
Continue readingAPI Versioning: How to Change a Live API Without Breaking Every Client
Every Go service that talks to PostgreSQL sits on top of a pool, and almost every incident review that mentions
Continue readingConnection Pooling Is a Queue: Sizing pgxpool Against PostgreSQL’s Process Model
Every allocation your program makes is a promise the kernel keeps lazily. When you write make([]byte, 512<<20) in Go, you
Continue readingVirtual Memory Is Deferred Work: Page Faults, RSS, and Why Allocation Numbers Lie
Whenever your backend fetches a URL that a user influenced — webhook targets, import-from-URL features, URL previews, PDF generators, RSS
Continue readingSSRF Defense That Actually Holds: DNS Rebinding, Redirects, and Cloud Metadata
The most expensive lie a system can tell is that it accepted work it cannot process in time. It usually
Continue readingBackpressure: What Your System Should Do When Consumers Fall Behind
Every language-level sync.Mutex rests on a guarantee the operating system makes for you: if a thread dies holding the lock,
Every so often a profiler hands you a paradox. Your server is running eight worker goroutines, the load is perfectly
Continue readingFalse Sharing: When Your Parallel Code Is Secretly Serial
The migration that works on staging and melts down production usually dies in the lock queue. Someone runs an ALTER
Continue readingZero-Downtime Schema Migrations: Expand-Contract on PostgreSQL, Step by Step