Blog
Notes from the field: cloud, AI, leadership, and building startups.
Engineering Velocity at the Seed Stage
How to maximize your engineering output in the earliest startup days when every sprint counts and resources are severely constrained
AWS Step Functions Orchestration Patterns: Error Handling That Saved Our Payment Pipeline
Production-tested workflow patterns with Step Functions including retry strategies, error handling, and compensation logic for critical financial workflows.
Engineering Performance Reviews: Building a Fair Process
How to design and run performance reviews that engineers trust, reduce bias, reward real contribution, and actually help people grow
Lambda Layer Strategies for Shared Dependencies at Scale
Practical patterns for managing Lambda Layers — when to share, when to bundle, versioning strategies, and the cold start trade-offs most teams ignore.
Multi-Cloud Disaster Recovery: Active-Active Across AWS and GCP with RTO < 5 Minutes
A production-tested architecture for active-active disaster recovery spanning AWS and GCP, achieving sub-5-minute RTO with automated failover and data consistency guarantees.
Container Runtime Security with Falco for Kubernetes
Implementing real-time threat detection in Kubernetes clusters using Falco for syscall-level monitoring and automated incident response
Infrastructure Spending at Every Funding Stage: A Startup Guide
How much should you spend on infrastructure at each stage? Real benchmarks from seed to Series C with decision frameworks for when to invest and when to optimize.
Infrastructure Drift Detection and Self-Healing Remediation
Building an automated drift detection system that identifies infrastructure divergence from declared state and triggers self-healing remediation pipelines.
AI-Powered Anomaly Detection for Time Series Data
Implementing production-grade anomaly detection systems using transformer models, statistical methods, and ensemble approaches for real-time monitoring
Building Reusable CDK Construct Libraries for Platform Teams
Patterns for packaging, versioning, and distributing CDK constructs that enforce organizational standards while giving product teams deployment autonomy.
GCP Spanner Global Consistency: TrueTime, Latency Trade-offs, and Production Patterns
How Cloud Spanner achieves global strong consistency using TrueTime, with real latency data and architectural patterns for multi-region deployments.
Technical Signals That Indicate Product-Market Fit
How CTOs can identify product-market fit through engineering metrics, system behavior, and usage patterns before the business metrics confirm it
DynamoDB Single-Table Design: Advanced Patterns From a 4TB Production Table
Advanced DynamoDB access patterns, GSI strategies, and single-table design lessons from operating a 4TB table handling 180K RCU at peak.
Building Trust With a New Engineering Team
Practical strategies for earning trust quickly when you join or inherit an engineering team, without the usual missteps that new leaders make
WebSocket APIs at Scale: Handling 100K Concurrent Connections on API Gateway
Architecture patterns for scaling API Gateway WebSocket APIs to 100K+ concurrent connections — connection management, fan-out optimization, and cost analysis.
AWS EBS io2 Block Express Performance Benchmarks and Optimization
Detailed performance benchmarks of AWS EBS io2 Block Express volumes with tuning strategies for database and high-throughput workloads
Blue-Green Deployments with Database Migrations: Patterns That Actually Work
Database migration strategies that maintain backward compatibility during blue-green deployments, enabling zero-downtime releases for stateful applications.
Lambda Destinations for Reliable Async Processing
Replacing SQS-based retry logic with Lambda Destinations — simpler architecture, built-in failure routing, and 40% less infrastructure to manage.
Translating Engineering Metrics for Non-Technical Board Members
A CTO guide to presenting engineering health, velocity, and risk in language that resonates with board members who think in revenue, not repositories.
Tokenizer Efficiency in Multilingual LLMs: Benchmarks and Optimization
Measuring tokenizer fertility rates across languages and exploring techniques to reduce token bloat for cost-effective multilingual AI systems
CloudFront Edge Caching Strategies That Cut Our P95 Latency by 73%
Advanced edge caching patterns with CloudFront Functions, origin shield, and cache key optimization that reduced P95 latency from 820ms to 220ms.
Open Source Strategy as a Startup Business Model
How to build a sustainable business around open source software without giving away your competitive advantage
GCP BigQuery Cost Optimization: Slot Management and Query Patterns That Save Millions
Practical strategies for reducing BigQuery costs through slot management, query optimization, and architectural patterns tested at scale.
Hiring Senior Engineers: Designing an Interview Process That Works
A complete guide to designing interview loops for senior engineers that assess real ability while respecting candidates and reducing bias
Local Serverless Development with SAM and Docker: Patterns That Scale
How to build a productive local development workflow for serverless applications using SAM CLI, Docker, and LocalStack — testing 90% of your logic without deploying.
GCP Global Load Balancer Routing Strategies for Multi-Region Apps
Implementing Google Cloud global load balancing with advanced routing rules, traffic splitting, and intelligent failover across regions
Docker Multi-Stage Build Optimization: Reducing Image Sizes by 78%
A systematic approach to multi-stage Docker builds that reduced our production image sizes from 1.2GB to 267MB while improving build cache efficiency.
Building a Production Recommendation Engine with Collaborative Filtering
End-to-end guide to designing, training, and serving collaborative filtering recommendation systems with real-time personalization at scale
When AWS App Runner Beats Lambda for Web Workloads
A data-driven comparison of App Runner vs Lambda for HTTP APIs — where container-based serverless wins on latency, cost, and developer experience.
AWS ECS vs EKS in Production: A 2-Year Retrospective with Real Metrics
Side-by-side production comparison of ECS and EKS after running both for 2 years across 340+ microservices with operational cost and complexity data.
