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Tree traversal usually gets taught as three separate algorithms to memorize: preorder, inorder, postorder. They are not three algorithms. They are one recursive function with a single line moved to a different spot, and that one line decides which problems you can solve. I watched this trip up peopl
In many PHP and Laravel applications, entity lifecycles start simple. An Order can be: Pending Paid Shipped Cancelled When PHP introduced native Enums, they became the perfect fit for this kind of state modeling. They are type-safe, database-friendly, and much cleaner than arbitrary strings spread a
Microservices Patterns: A Practical Guide to Choosing the Right Architecture Most teams don't fail at microservices because the pattern is wrong. They fail because they adopted all the patterns at once, before they understood which problems each one was actually solving. I've watched teams ship a se
The Problem We Were Actually Solving At its core, the Treasure Hunt Engine is a distributed system that aggregates user-generated content, processes it in real-time, and surfaces the results on our web and mobile platforms. Sounds straightforward, but what we were really solving for was a system tha
Book: System Design Pocket Guide: Interviews — 15 Real System Designs, Step by Step Also by me: Thinking in Go (2-book series) — Complete Guide to Go Programming + Hexagonal Architecture in Go My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub — an IDE for developers who ship with Claude Code and other AI coding tools
Part 1 of 3 — the single-document case. There's a class of bug that every backend engineer ships at least once, usually Take a concrete invariant: a team can hold at most 10 seats. To add a seat you count < 10, and write. A textbook Read → Modify → Write. Now run it twice at the same instant. Reques
Roadmap Position: Stage 0 → Module 1 of 5 Prerequisite: None — this is where everything begins Next Module: 0.2 — Operating System Fundamentals Estimated Study Time: 2–3 days of focused study + hands-on practice Most cybersecurity courses rush past hardware. They hand you Kali Linux and say "start h
Building a generative AI application is easy; building one that is both blazingly fast and rigorously accurate is a completely different beast. Recently, as part of Challenge 2 for the Google Cloud Gen AI Academy (APAC Edition), I was tasked with moving beyond simple prompting and diving deep into S
