Kubai Kevin

Portfolio projects hiring managers skip

Portfolio projects often fail screening for legibility, not code quality. Here is how to restructure a repo so a reviewer understands it fast.

19 min read · 25 September 2026

Dead-letter queues: stop poison messages

Design retry caps, DLQs, and alerts so a poison message is isolated in seconds. Includes working Redis Queue code and pytest tests.

15 min read · 21 September 2026

Spot evictions: the retry logic that holds up

Spot evictions break naive retry logic. Learn how to decouple retries from instance lifecycle, add jitter, and avoid coordinated retry storms.

13 min read · 12 August 2026

Agent SLOs: measure what agents actually do

Latency and 5xx SLOs miss stuck loops. Define outcome SLOs on completion rate, with schema, PromQL, and failure handling.

13 min read · 11 August 2026

Agent followed instructions too literally: the cron job trap

Why agents that follow retry instructions literally hang forever, and how to fix it with per-request timeouts, async retries, and DNS limits.

12 min read · 11 August 2026

Agent frameworks: stop rewriting the same glue code

Agent glue code — retries, credentials, state — is mostly boilerplate. Here are three abstractions, worked examples, and how to measure the savings.

13 min read · 10 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

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

Price AI-proof skills in 2026

How to build an auditable compensation evidence pack that separates human-only work from AI-assisted output, with reproducible tooling and a negotiation script.

14 min read · 29 June 2026

Negotiate salaries with AI skills in 2026

A practical method for quantifying which parts of a job AI can automate, building a defensible salary anchor, and handling pushback in negotiation.

11 min read · 27 June 2026

Negotiate pay in 2026 with AI proof points

A repeatable method for turning Git history into reviewable evidence of human-owned engineering work, plus how to measure it honestly.

11 min read · 25 June 2026

AI stole system design

AI can generate a polished system design in seconds. Here is how to redesign interviews around live debugging so you test real understanding.

11 min read · 21 June 2026

AI interviews break systems: 5 real mistakes in 2026

AI coding assistants assume a standard Docker environment. Here are five failure modes that break builds in CI, with fixes, verification steps, and a checklist.

14 min read · 20 June 2026

Rebalance pay when AI fills half your role

Measure AI's share of your codebase, then renegotiate scope, level, and pay with evidence instead of anecdotes or cost-of-living framing.

13 min read · 15 June 2026

Why AI Interview Graders Reward Keywords Over Correct Design

AI interview graders score answers against training-data patterns, not correctness. Here is how the bias shows up and how to write answers that survive it.

12 min read · 14 June 2026

Turn AI coding telemetry into a salary negotiation case

Build a CLI that pulls AI coding-assistant session data, maps it to tickets, and produces defensible productivity numbers for pay talks.

12 min read · 11 June 2026

AI interviews broke system design: 3 patterns that

AI design tools produce complete-looking architectures that fail under real load. Three patterns, why they happen, and how to catch them before staging.

15 min read · 11 June 2026

RAG in prod: what tutorials won’t tell you

Why nightly embedding refreshes break RAG latency, and how a hot/cold retrieval split with partial vector updates fixes it.

14 min read · 8 June 2026