Blog
The Layer Under Everything - AWS IAM, VPCs, and Networking
The most recent stop on my AWS journey. IAM roles and least privilege, then the VPC fundamentals - subnets, route tables, gateways, and security groups - that finally explained why my ECS task couldn't reach the internet.
Running My Containers in the Cloud - AWS ECS and Fargate
Where I am right now in my AWS journey: taking the Docker images I built earlier and running them on ECS. Task definitions, services, Fargate vs EC2, and wiring up a load balancer.
Starting My AWS Journey with S3 - Object Storage Done Right
My first deep dive into AWS. What object storage really is, how buckets and keys work, storage classes, presigned URLs, and securing a bucket so I don't end up in a data-breach headline.
Building a CI/CD Pipeline I Actually Trust
From manual SSH deploys to automated GitHub Actions: testing, building images, pushing to a registry, and shipping safely with rolling and canary deploys.
Designing for Scale - Statelessness, Load Balancing, and the CAP Theorem in Practice
The fundamentals of horizontal scaling: why stateless services are the key, how load balancing and replication actually work, and the trade-offs CAP forces you to make.
Observability: Logs, Metrics, and Traces - Debugging Things I Can't See
Once my system went event-driven, print-debugging died. Here's how I learned the three pillars of observability and instrumented my services with OpenTelemetry.
Understanding Apache Kafka - Topics, Partitions, and Why the Log Is Everything
My deep dive into event streaming: how Kafka actually stores data, what consumer groups do, and how I reasoned about ordering, replication, and exactly-once delivery.
Redis and the Art of Caching Without Lying to Your Users
Cache-aside, TTLs, eviction policies, and the cache stampede that took down my dev environment until I learned about locks.
How I Stopped Writing Slow Queries - A Deep Dive into PostgreSQL Indexes
EXPLAIN ANALYZE became my best friend. Composite indexes, covering indexes, and the day I turned a 2.3s query into 4ms.
Learning Docker - From 'It Works on My Machine' to Reproducible Builds
My first real dive into containers - what an image actually is, why layers matter, and how multi-stage builds cut my image from 1.2GB to 180MB.