Writing
Notes from production
Schemas that had to change, queries that had to get faster, and the infrastructure underneath. RSS.
Backend engineering
Multi-tenant systems, migrations, search, and APIs
Sharding didn't just scale us. It cut the bill.
Vertical scaling has a brutal cost curve — every tier up charges a premium on top of the extra CPU and memory. Notes on how sharding a 4 TB search corpus turned that curve into a fleet of commodity nodes, and where the savings actually came from.
Claude wrote it in 40 seconds. Production killed it in 4.
AI coding tools optimize for green tests — one user, one region, no contention. Production asks about stale reads, hot partitions, flat rate limits, and failover without fencing. Notes on where the gap actually is.
Fibonacci lockouts: rate limiting a scraper that keeps coming back
Per-client request budgets over a 4 TB search corpus, and lockout windows that escalate along a Fibonacci sequence — why that curve rather than exponential backoff, and what the 24-hour window is really for.
Building RAG over twenty years of grant compliance
How I built retrieval-augmented answers over a multi-tenant compliance platform — tenant-scoped retrieval, record-shaped chunks, pgvector plus Elasticsearch, Cohere reranking on Bedrock, and citations that are checked before they are shown.
What a JSONB form engine cost us
Notes on backing a multi-tenant form engine with PostgreSQL JSONB — where it bought configuration without deployments, and where it quietly bought a sequential scan.
Practical notes
Recommendations
Shorter answers to questions I get asked outside work — hosting, privacy, and the like.
Where to put a small site
Shared hosting, a VPS, or a platform — the question is not which is most powerful, it is who is going to patch it at 2am. A backend engineer's case for boring hosting.
What a VPN is actually for
A VPN does not make you anonymous. It moves the trust boundary from the network you are sitting on to the provider you picked — which is worth paying for in some places and worth nothing in others.