Designing an Offline-First Sync Engine for Mobile Apps
7 min read
A deep dive into building a reliable sync engine that keeps mobile apps functional without connectivity, covering conflict resolution, queue management, and real-world trade-offs.
Jetpack Compose Recomposition: A Deep Dive
7 min read
A detailed look at how Compose recomposition works under the hood, what triggers it, how the slot table tracks state, and how to control it in production apps.
Event Tracking System Design for Android Applications
6 min read
A systems-level breakdown of designing an event tracking system for Android, covering batching, schema enforcement, local persistence, and delivery guarantees.
Designing a Feature Flag and Remote Config System
6 min read
Architecture and trade-offs for building a feature flag and remote configuration system that handles targeting, rollout, and consistency across mobile clients.
SSR vs SSG vs ISR in Next.js: What I Measured
6 min read
Concrete latency, TTFB, and cache-hit measurements across SSR, SSG, and ISR rendering strategies in Next.js under realistic traffic.
Mobile Analytics Pipeline: From App Event to Dashboard
6 min read
End-to-end design of a mobile analytics pipeline covering ingestion, processing, storage, and querying, with emphasis on reliability and latency trade-offs.
Design Trade-offs I'd Make Differently Today
6 min read
A retrospective on architectural decisions that seemed right at the time but aged poorly, and what I would choose instead with the benefit of hindsight.
Building a View Counter System With Postgres
6 min read
Designing a page view counter that handles concurrent writes, avoids double-counting, and stays responsive under load using Postgres.
Designing Idempotent APIs for Mobile Clients
7 min read
How to design APIs that handle duplicate requests safely, covering idempotency keys, server-side deduplication, and failure scenarios specific to mobile networks.
Avoiding Hidden Recomposition Traps in Compose
9 min read
Practical catalog of non-obvious Compose patterns that trigger excessive recomposition, with fixes and measurement strategies for each.
Refactoring a System Without Breaking Users
6 min read
Strategies for large-scale refactors that keep production stable, covering parallel runs, feature flags, gradual migrations, and verification techniques.
Handling Data Conflicts in Offline-First Systems
7 min read
Strategies for detecting and resolving data conflicts in offline-first mobile systems, covering CRDTs, last-write-wins, operational transforms, and manual resolution.
Comparing Search Implementations: Client vs Server
6 min read
Measuring latency, bundle size, and relevance quality between client-side search with Fuse.js and server-side search with Postgres full-text and Meilisearch.
Designing Retry and Backoff Strategies for Mobile Networks
7 min read
A detailed look at retry strategies for mobile clients, covering exponential backoff, jitter, circuit breakers, and adaptive retry policies for unreliable networks.
Binder, Threads, and Performance Implications
8 min read
A deep examination of Android's Binder IPC mechanism, its thread pool model, and the performance consequences that surface at scale in large applications.
Versioning APIs Without Breaking Old Mobile Apps
7 min read
Strategies for API versioning that keep old mobile app versions functional, covering URL versioning, header versioning, additive changes, and deprecation policies.
Failure Modes I Actively Design For
6 min read
A catalog of failure modes that experienced engineers anticipate and design around, from cascading failures to data corruption to clock skew.
Designing Mobile Systems for Poor Network Conditions
7 min read
Architecture patterns for mobile apps that function reliably on slow, intermittent, and lossy networks, covering request prioritization, adaptive quality, and graceful degradation.
Understanding Android Lifecycle at Scale
7 min read
How lifecycle mismanagement causes memory leaks, state loss, and crashes in large Android apps, with patterns for handling lifecycle correctly across complex component hierarchies.
Designing an Experimentation Platform for Mobile Apps
8 min read
System design for a mobile experimentation platform covering assignment, exposure tracking, metric collection, statistical analysis, and guardrail metrics.
Measuring Cold Starts Across Different Architectures
7 min read
Cold start latency measurements across AWS Lambda, Vercel Functions, Cloudflare Workers, and containerized deployments with concrete numbers.
Why Simple Systems Scale Better
6 min read
An argument for architectural simplicity as a scaling strategy, with examples of how complexity creates bottlenecks that simple designs avoid.
Understanding the Android Main Thread at Scale
9 min read
A systems-level look at the Android main thread, its message queue, how work is scheduled and blocked, and strategies for keeping it responsive in large-scale apps.
Managing Large Dependency Graphs in Android
8 min read
Strategies for structuring, optimizing, and debugging dependency injection graphs in large Android apps using Dagger/Hilt, covering scoping, build performance, and runtime cost.
Designing Rate Limiting for Mobile APIs
7 min read
Rate limiting strategies for APIs consumed by mobile clients, covering token bucket algorithms, client identification, degradation modes, and mobile-specific considerations.
Designing a Simple CMS From Scratch
6 min read
Architecture decisions behind building a file-based CMS with MDX, Git-backed versioning, and incremental builds for a content-heavy site.
Engineering Decisions I Don't Compromise On
6 min read
Non-negotiable engineering principles I enforce regardless of deadline pressure, team size, or scope, and the reasoning behind each one.
Designing Event Schemas That Survive Product Changes
7 min read
How to design analytics event schemas that remain valid through product pivots, feature changes, and evolving business requirements without breaking downstream consumers.
Designing a Simple Metrics Collection Service
8 min read
Architecture for a lightweight metrics ingestion pipeline using a buffer, batch writes, and pre-aggregated rollups on Postgres.
Designing Systems That Are Hard to Misuse
6 min read
How to design APIs, configurations, and system interfaces that guide users toward correct usage and make dangerous operations difficult to perform accidentally.
Client-Heavy vs Server-Heavy Architectures for Mobile
8 min read
Comparing client-heavy and server-heavy mobile architectures across performance, maintainability, update velocity, and user experience trade-offs.
Designing Systems That Fail Loudly
6 min read
Why silent failures are more dangerous than crashes, and how to design systems that surface problems immediately rather than hiding them behind fallback behavior.
Handling Background Execution Limits Correctly
8 min read
A comprehensive guide to working within Android's background execution restrictions across API levels, covering Doze, App Standby, foreground service requirements, and WorkManager strategies.
Designing Background Job Systems for Mobile Apps
7 min read
Architecture for reliable background job execution on Android, covering WorkManager, job prioritization, constraint handling, and failure recovery.
Testing Caching Strategies in Real Conditions
7 min read
Comparing cache-aside, write-through, and read-through strategies with measured hit rates, latency, and consistency trade-offs under production traffic patterns.
What Makes a System Easy to Debug
7 min read
Concrete design decisions that make production systems debuggable, from structured logging and correlation IDs to deterministic behavior and state inspection.
Comparing REST vs GraphQL for Mobile Clients
7 min read
Measured payload sizes, request counts, latency, and battery impact of REST vs GraphQL APIs serving a mobile application with varying network conditions.
Designing Secure Auth Flows for Mobile Applications
7 min read
Architecture for secure authentication flows in mobile apps, covering OAuth 2.0 with PKCE, token management, biometric auth, and session security.
When Abstractions Become a Liability
7 min read
Identifying the point where abstractions stop helping and start hurting, with patterns for recognizing and resolving abstraction debt.
Implementing Server-Side Rendering Without Overhead
8 min read
Techniques for reducing SSR latency including streaming, selective hydration, component-level caching, and measured performance gains.
When Caching Makes Things Worse
6 min read
Real scenarios where adding a cache increased complexity, introduced bugs, or degraded performance, and the decision framework I use to evaluate whether a cache is the right solution.
Designing APIs With Mobile Constraints in Mind
7 min read
How to design backend APIs that account for mobile-specific constraints: bandwidth, latency, battery, intermittent connectivity, and long-lived client versions.
Building a Rate-Limited API From Scratch
7 min read
Implementing token bucket and sliding window rate limiting with Redis, including burst handling, multi-tier limits, and measured overhead.
Designing With Future Engineers in Mind
7 min read
How to build systems that new team members can understand, modify, and operate safely without requiring extensive tribal knowledge transfer.
Trade-offs in Push vs Pull Architectures for Mobile
9 min read
A comparison of push and pull architectures for mobile data delivery, covering WebSockets, SSE, polling, push notifications, and hybrid approaches with their constraints.
How I Decide Where Complexity Belongs
7 min read
A framework for placing complexity in the right layer of a system, whether that is the client, the server, the database, or the infrastructure.
Making Trade-offs That Age Well
7 min read
How to evaluate architectural trade-offs not just for current requirements but for how they will hold up as the system, team, and business evolve.
Testing Client-Side Caching Strategies
7 min read
Measuring the impact of HTTP cache headers, service workers, and local storage caching on repeat visit performance and data freshness.
Trade-offs Between Speed and Safety
7 min read
A framework for navigating the tension between shipping fast and shipping safely, with specific examples of when to prioritize each and the mechanisms that let you do both.
Designing for Observability From Day One
7 min read
How to build observability into system architecture from the start, covering the three pillars, instrumentation patterns, and common pitfalls.
Designing a Simple Authentication Service
8 min read
Architecture for a session-based authentication service with JWT access tokens, refresh token rotation, and measured security trade-offs.
Measuring the Cost of Abstractions
8 min read
Benchmarking the runtime overhead of ORMs, validation libraries, middleware chains, and framework abstractions with concrete performance numbers.
How I Think About System Boundaries
6 min read
A framework for deciding where to draw boundaries in software systems, covering service boundaries, module boundaries, and data boundaries, with the trade-offs of each approach.
Choosing Boring Technology on Purpose
7 min read
Why mature, well-understood technology is usually the right choice, how to evaluate when new technology is justified, and the hidden costs of novelty.
Building a Simple Search Index
8 min read
Designing an inverted index from scratch with tokenization, ranking, and query parsing, then comparing it against Postgres full-text search.
What I Optimize for as a Builder
7 min read
The specific qualities I prioritize when designing and building software systems, and why these priorities differ from what most engineering culture emphasizes.
Designing Systems That Degrade Gracefully
7 min read
How to build systems that continue providing value when components fail, covering load shedding, fallback strategies, and partial availability patterns.
Experimenting With Background Workers at Scale
8 min read
Testing job queue architectures with BullMQ, Postgres-based queues, and SQS under increasing job volumes, with failure handling and scaling measurements.
Designing Systems for Humans, Not Just Machines
7 min read
Why the human factors in system design, including cognitive load, operational ergonomics, and team structure, matter as much as the technical architecture.
How I Think About Engineering Risk
7 min read
A framework for identifying, categorizing, and managing engineering risk across system design, team dynamics, and operational decisions.
What Good Engineering Looks Like in Practice
6 min read
Concrete characteristics that distinguish good engineering from impressive engineering, based on observations across teams and systems over many years.
When to Rewrite vs Refactor
8 min read
A decision framework for choosing between incremental refactoring and a full rewrite, based on system state, team context, and business constraints.
How I Evaluate Technical Proposals
7 min read
The specific questions and frameworks I use when reviewing technical proposals, design documents, and architecture decisions, based on patterns from hundreds of reviews.
Building Systems That Can Be Explained Simply
7 min read
Why the ability to explain a system in simple terms is a design constraint, not a communication skill, and how to build systems that meet this standard.
What I Look for in System Designs
7 min read
The specific qualities and patterns I look for when reviewing system designs, from data flow clarity to failure mode analysis, and the common mistakes that signal deeper problems.
Engineering Principles I Apply Across Domains
8 min read
Universal engineering principles that hold true regardless of language, framework, domain, or scale, distilled from years of building production systems.
How My Design Thinking Has Evolved
7 min read
A candid look at how my approach to system design has changed over the years, from over-engineering to pragmatism, and the experiences that drove each shift.
Designing for Change Without Over-Engineering
8 min read
How to build systems that accommodate future changes without building unnecessary abstraction layers, speculative features, or premature generalization.
Engineering Lessons I Relearned the Hard Way
7 min read
Lessons that I knew intellectually but had to learn through painful experience before they truly changed my behavior, covering testing, deployments, dependencies, and team dynamics.
Designing Systems I'd Be Proud to Maintain
8 min read
The design principles I follow to build systems that are not just functional but genuinely pleasant to maintain, debug, and evolve over time.
Building With Intent, Not Just Tools
8 min read
Why the choice of tools matters less than the intent behind how you use them, and how to maintain architectural clarity regardless of the technology stack.