Blog
Notes from the field: cloud, AI, leadership, and building startups.
Compliance Engineering at the Early Stage
How startup CTOs can build compliance into the product architecture from day one without slowing down velocity
A Framework for Measuring and Prioritizing Technical Debt
Stop arguing about tech debt in the abstract—quantify it with this data-driven framework that ties engineering health to business outcomes.
GCP Cloud Run Auto-Scaling in Production: A Deep Dive into Request-Based Metrics
Analyzing Cloud Run scaling behavior under production traffic with request-based metrics, concurrency tuning, and cold start mitigation strategies.
Giving Engineers Autonomy Without Chaos
How to create the right balance of freedom and structure so your engineering team moves fast without creating a maintenance nightmare
AWS Transit Gateway Multicast Networking for Distributed Systems
Implementing multicast networking with AWS Transit Gateway to enable efficient one-to-many data distribution across VPCs
GitHub Actions Self-Hosted Runners on AWS with Auto-Scaling
Building a cost-efficient, auto-scaling GitHub Actions runner fleet on EC2 that reduced our CI/CD costs by 64% while cutting build times in half.
Full-Stack Deployment with AWS Amplify Gen 2 and CDK
Moving from Amplify Gen 1 to Gen 2 — TypeScript-first backends, CDK under the hood, and per-developer sandboxes that actually work.
AWS S3 Intelligent-Tiering: A Cost Analysis That Saved Us $180K/Year
Detailed cost modeling across S3 storage tiers with ROI calculations from migrating 420TB of production data to Intelligent-Tiering.
HNSW vs IVF: Vector Index Benchmarks for Production Similarity Search
Comprehensive benchmarks comparing HNSW and IVF vector indexes across recall, latency, memory usage, and build time for real-world embedding search workloads
Scaling Engineering Teams from 20 to 50 Without Losing Velocity
A practical playbook for growing engineering teams through the hardest phase—doubling headcount while maintaining delivery speed and culture.
Evaluating a Technical Co-Founder for Your Startup
A systematic framework for assessing technical co-founder candidates beyond coding ability to find the right building partner
Running 70% of Batch Workloads on Fargate Spot: Our Cost Optimization Playbook
How we cut ECS compute costs by 62% by strategically routing batch workloads to Fargate Spot with graceful interruption handling and capacity provider strategies.
Engineering Team Communication: Going Async-First
How to shift your engineering team to asynchronous communication without losing collaboration, speed, or team cohesion
Terraform State Management at Scale: Lessons from 200+ Microservices
How we architected Terraform state management across 200+ microservices with workspace isolation, remote locking, and automated state operations.
Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler Tuning for Production Workloads
Advanced techniques for tuning HPA scaling behavior to eliminate oscillation, reduce cold starts, and optimize resource utilization
Designing an AI Content Moderation System at Scale
Architecture patterns, model cascading strategies, and operational lessons from building content moderation systems processing millions of items daily
AWS Lambda Cold Start Optimization: From 6s to 200ms in Production
A deep dive into Lambda cold start reduction strategies with real benchmark data from production workloads processing 2M+ requests daily.
Production GraphQL with AWS AppSync: Caching, Auth, and Real-Time Subscriptions
Lessons from running AppSync at scale — implementing multi-layer caching, fine-grained authorization, and WebSocket subscriptions serving 50K concurrent users.
API-First Product Strategy for Startups
Why building your startup API-first creates compounding advantages in partnerships, developer adoption, and long-term platform value
AWS Lambda Powertools: Production-Grade Observability in Minutes
How to implement structured logging, distributed tracing, and custom metrics in AWS Lambda using Powertools — reducing MTTR by 60% across our serverless fleet.
Running Productive Sprint Retrospectives
How to facilitate retrospectives that generate actionable improvements instead of recycling the same complaints every two weeks
AWS Elastic IP Costs $43/Year Now — Here's What Changed
AWS now charges $3.60/month for every public IPv4 address, even attached ones. Full pricing breakdown, how to find unused EIPs, and a cleanup script that saved us $2,400/year.
LoRA vs QLoRA: A Practical Comparison for LLM Fine-Tuning
Benchmarking LoRA and QLoRA fine-tuning methods across memory usage, training speed, and downstream task performance for production deployments
GCP Cloud Storage Lifecycle Automation for Cost Optimization
How to implement lifecycle policies in Google Cloud Storage to automate data tiering and reduce storage costs by up to 70%
Making Startup Tech Stack Decisions in 2026
A practical CTO framework for choosing your startup's tech stack without overthinking it or locking yourself into costly mistakes
Writing Engineering RFCs That Get Approved
A practical guide to writing Request for Comments documents that align stakeholders, reduce friction, and actually get approved by your engineering organization
Text Classification at Scale: Production Pipeline Guide
Deploy text classification with transformers in production. Covers model selection, ONNX optimization (4.6x throughput), serving infrastructure, and drift monitoring at scale.
AWS Route 53 DNS Failover Patterns for High Availability
A data-driven guide to implementing DNS failover patterns with AWS Route 53 for multi-region high availability architectures
