Older Posts — Page 2 of 18
Small language models: the classifier trap
Why compact classifiers fail on rare inputs, and how per-label thresholds, guardrails and score monitoring contain the damage.
15 min read · 31 October 2026
Dependency pinning: the lockfile lie
A lockfile records a resolution, not a guarantee. Learn where determinism breaks, how to enforce lockfiles in CI, and how pinning interacts with SCA.
16 min read · 31 October 2026
KYC integrations: the data you shouldn't store
Design a KYC integration that persists only the decision and a vendor reference, with the raw identity evidence kept by the vendor under contract.
16 min read · 30 October 2026
OpenTelemetry collector pipelines: sampling, batching…
How receivers, processors, and exporters interact under load, with worked memory arithmetic, sampling trade-offs, routing isolation, and metrics to watch.
13 min read · 30 October 2026
Node.js memory leak: find it in 10 min
Classify rising memory before profiling it: compare heapUsed and rss, take two heap snapshots, read retainer paths, and bound every in-memory structure.
14 min read · 29 October 2026
AI answers first, judgment later
AI assistants give juniors fast, confident answers without your system's context. Here is how to move mentoring from giving answers to reviewing judgment.
14 min read · 29 October 2026
Database restore drills that mean something
A repeatable PostgreSQL restore drill that measures recovery time, data loss window and integrity, plus the failure modes that make drills lie.
15 min read · 28 October 2026
Multi-agent DX: LangGraph vs CrewAI gaps
Where LangGraph and CrewAI leave you on your own when debugging multi-agent systems, the failure modes that recur, and how to instrument for causal traces.
16 min read · 28 October 2026
JWT sessions: revocation, rotation, storage
Why JWT revocation is a state problem, how refresh token rotation with reuse detection works, and how token storage shapes the threat model.
14 min read · 27 October 2026
Context engineering: the real fix for agent hallucinations
Long-running agents fail because their context fills with stale tool output and contradictions. Here is how to structure, prune and measure that context.
16 min read · 27 October 2026
HPA vs KEDA vs Karpenter: autoscaling traps
How HPA, KEDA and Karpenter divide responsibility, where each one silently fails, and how to verify each layer before traffic arrives.
17 min read · 26 October 2026
Drift detection: the plan that lies
Terraform plan only reports drift a provider reads back. Build observe-classify-remediate pipelines that catch out-of-band changes safely.
16 min read · 26 October 2026
7 guardrails for safer LLM apps
A practical review of seven guardrail layers for LLM applications: what each catches, where it fails, and which to build first.
18 min read · 25 October 2026
When velocity is hard to measure: evaluating engineering…
Velocity measures capacity, not output. Build a three-layer evidence portfolio—delivery, stability, outcome—and compute it from data you already have.
14 min read · 25 October 2026
ISO 20022: where payment rails actually break
ISO 20022 migrations fail in mapping policy, code-list governance and character rules, not XML parsing. A layered design and checklist for payment rails.
17 min read · 24 October 2026
HTTP/3 changes less than the demos imply
HTTP/3 usually terminates at the CDN, so origin behavior barely changes. Here is where QUIC matters, where it does not, and how to measure a rollout.
13 min read · 24 October 2026
Agentic systems: architecture principles that hold
How to enforce deadlines, token budgets, idempotency keys and bounded fan-out around multi-model agent graphs, with Python code and tests.
15 min read · 23 October 2026
Agent code review: 7 traps that slip through
Agent-written code passes its own tests and reads as deliberate. Here are seven recurring traps, the mechanical checks that catch them, and how to measure.
17 min read · 23 October 2026
OAuth 2.1 migration: what breaks in existing integrations
OAuth 2.1 removes the implicit and password grants, mandates PKCE, and requires exact redirect URIs. Here is what breaks and how to sequence the migration.
18 min read · 22 October 2026
Velocity Up, Ownership Down: Team Scaling Trap
A practical framework for finding ownership blur, assigning accountable owners, and enforcing it with CODEOWNERS, CI checks, and incident tooling.
14 min read · 22 October 2026
Remote premium rates: skills AI can't copy
Four drills for remote engineers: latency budgets, evidence-based diagnosis, decision records and handoff artifacts that outlast the work.
19 min read · 21 October 2026
Docs that survive: the bus factor fix
How to write runbooks and design docs that a new engineer can follow without asking the author: explicit audience, exact commands, expected output, and rollback.
15 min read · 21 October 2026
MCP vs A2A: pick the wrong layer
MCP connects models to tools; A2A connects agents to agents. How to tell which layer a boundary belongs to, and what breaks when you mix them.
16 min read · 20 October 2026
Property-based testing vs example tests: the bug gap
How example-based and property-based tests differ in what they catch, what each costs to maintain, and how to split work between them in financial code.
18 min read · 20 October 2026