Older Posts — Page 9 of 18
Offline-first money apps with DynamoDB Streams
Design an offline-first mobile-money sync pipeline on DynamoDB Streams: idempotency keys, conditional balance writes, DLQ handling, and how to measure it.
15 min read · 8 August 2026
AI cost attribution without the spreadsheet hell
How to attribute AI inference costs to users, features and models: instrumentation, cardinality limits, sampling error, and a 30-minute first step.
15 min read · 7 August 2026
Agents create incidents at 2am
Why autonomous agents that can open, mutate, or page on incidents cause 2am page storms, and how write boundaries and idempotent alerting fix it.
12 min read · 6 August 2026
Cost-Effective AI Infrastructure for Micro-SaaS
How to architect an AI micro-SaaS on a tight budget: caching, batching, serverless scaling, cost measurement, and the failure modes that break naive designs.
15 min read · 5 August 2026
Mobile money agent fees: why your bot keeps failing
USSD session timeouts, not payment errors, break mobile money bots in production. Diagnose the session contract mismatch and fix it with per-request clients.
13 min read · 5 August 2026
Stopping a runaway polling agent from flooding your API
Diagnose and fix runaway agent API calls: bounded retries, capped backoff, idempotency keys, and volume alerts that catch spikes before the bill does.
15 min read · 5 August 2026
WASM servers beat containers here
A practical guide to choosing WebAssembly over containers for short-lived, CPU-bound server tasks, with code, failure modes, and a measurement plan.
12 min read · 5 August 2026
Senior role projects: 3 real paths
Build three portfolio projects that demonstrate tenant isolation, retry-storm handling, and event sourcing, with concrete ways to measure each claim.
16 min read · 5 August 2026
MCP servers: the 3 hidden costs nobody quotes
MCP servers are stateful async processes, not stateless APIs. Here are the real cost drivers, failure modes, and how to measure them yourself.
16 min read · 5 August 2026
RAG rots if you don’t refresh indexes
RAG indexes rot when source documents change. Learn change detection, chunk versioning, and incremental refresh patterns, with code and a cost model.
15 min read · 4 August 2026
Kubernetes or Nomad: the real experiment cost split
A practical comparison of Kubernetes and Nomad for GPU training jobs, covering scheduler latency, cost modelling, GPU sharing, and a decision checklist.
11 min read · 3 August 2026
Supervisor vs swarm vs debate vs pipeline
Compare four multi-agent orchestration patterns: supervisor, swarm, debate, and pipeline. Covers failure modes, backpressure, retries, and how to measure each.
19 min read · 3 August 2026
Prompt Injection Is Not Your Biggest LLM Data Risk
Prompt injection dominates LLM security checklists, but poisoned training data and label drift often cause more damage. A pipeline-stage model for triage.
17 min read · 3 August 2026
CDC pipeline death spiral: one bad LLM call can crash…
How unconstrained LLM bursts stall CDC pipelines, and how to add backpressure at each layer with metrics, configs, and a worked failure example.
12 min read · 2 August 2026
Hire for agents, not autocomplete
Constraint-aware hiring tests whether engineers can ship when networks are slow, gateways fail, and CI times out. Includes code, failure modes, and a 30-minute action.
13 min read · 2 August 2026
Designing Reliable Webhook Pipelines for African Payment APIs
How to build idempotent, resilient webhook pipelines for M-Pesa, Paystack and Flutterwave APIs, including retries, deduplication and failure modes.
12 min read · 1 August 2026
Why APM Misses GPU-Bound LLM Incidents
Application monitoring traces Python calls, not CUDA kernels or batch queues. Here is how to instrument the layers where LLM latency actually hides.
12 min read · 1 August 2026
Boring AWS Lambda layers that don’t lock…
How to version, publish and reference Lambda layers so runtime upgrades, region moves and architecture changes don't break dependent functions.
12 min read · 31 July 2026
Agent permissions: the mistake that breaks production
How to build desktop agents that survive no-admin Windows environments: COM automation, per-user installs, heartbeats, and failure design, with code.
17 min read · 30 July 2026
Agent auth: the silent deployment killer
How agent identity breaks under jitter, power loss, and low-end devices, and the fallback, rotation, and caching patterns that keep auth working.
13 min read · 30 July 2026
Event-driven systems avoid agent-driven contention
How to tell when scheduled jobs and polling loops quietly turn an event-driven system into an agent-driven one, and how to fix it without a rewrite.
15 min read · 30 July 2026
When a vector DB misconfiguration breaks RAG silently
Vector DB misconfigurations cause RAG outages that look like app bugs. Learn to detect index errors, add circuit breakers, and instrument query latency.
11 min read · 29 July 2026
AI tools won’t help if everyone writes the same code
AI coding assistants amplify existing team imbalances. Here is how to measure per-author incident rates and rebalance review load without policing.
14 min read · 29 July 2026
Global state is the wrong tool for AI features
Why a single global store breaks under streaming AI: memory growth, race conditions, undo cost, plus a decision checklist and measurement plan.
12 min read · 28 July 2026