Unlearn faster
When I started engineering seriously, I carried a lot of "correct" patterns in my head. Microservices were the gold standard, so the real-world project I led the development on had to be microservices
Alan Varghese
Latest articles
Your website has a carbon footprint too.
Every page load burns electricity — servers, networks, your user's device. That electricity usually comes from fossil fuels. An average webpage generates ~0.5g of CO2 per visit. Multiply by trillions
Version control your motivation
Look, I’m not going to pretend like I’ve cracked the code to productivity or motivation. I’ve abandoned more projects than I’ve finished - ideas that started with excitement and died somewhere between “this is going to be epic” and “meh, I’ll get aro...
Reducing blast radius when designing APIs
I’ve been designing APIs for almost a decade now and one of the things that I frequently see developers get wrong is with designing APIs that are stiff and tightly coupled to their clients. Modern software demands velocity: new features, experiments,...
Your users aren't IP addresses.
Let’s get this out of the way first: I’m not saying IP-based rate limiting is bad. Sometimes it’s the only thing you can. But if you’re still defaulting to IPs every time without thinking twice, you’re doing your users and yourself a disservice. Ther...
Auth is a product, not a feature.
Rolling your own auth is difficult, but let's try anyways
Don't be a ticket engineer.
Imagine one day, you’re scrolling through your Jira tickets, and the latest ones are marked as resolved by AI. Why wouldn’t it be? If it had access to the code, understands the requirements, and has been trained on previous human input, it’s perfectl...