Series
16 posts
7 posts
A centralized settings module as the last line of defense: boot gates that collect every missing variable, fallbacks that log at ERROR instead of degrading quietly, and why point-of-use beats boot-time for some checks.
Building a voice agent that takes real phone calls: HMAC-verified webhooks, a sideband transcript pump, delegation-based tool dispatch, and a refusal layer protected by cryptographic digests.
Deploying the voice agent on Kubernetes: why one missing webhook secret took a whole namespace down three times, the split-horizon DNS that silently killed observability, and the isolation patterns that came out of it.
A .NET service that ran out of memory in production: per-meeting state that outlived the meetings, a GC ceiling fixed at process start, and why raising the limit was the right stopgap — done deliberately.
How the team scaled LLM-assisted development with specialized agents, an adversarial test-triage workflow, and hooks executed by the harness — the layer that instructions cannot override.
Clean-code and clean-architecture standards meeting real code: the boolean flag that became two functions, the 70 duplicated lines that stayed duplicated on purpose, and import invariants enforced by AST tests.
Inside the AI agent backend: LangGraph runtimes cached on a 16-part key, progressive skill disclosure with a 128-tool cap, compare-and-swap settings mirrors, and a feedback pipeline that groups meetings by red flags.
9 posts
The first post in my Techstack Challenges series, about a client engagement where the coding standards were not a wiki page but executable files in the repo, loaded by both humans and coding agents before every change.
How the Meridian web app picked React 19, TanStack Router and Query, Jotai, and Tailwind v4 — and why the most valuable piece of the design system was a single prop called containerClassName.
A look inside the three most complex feature areas of the Meridian web app — the assistant console, survey administration, and the audit-heavy admin surface — and the shared architecture underneath all of them.
Building a FastAPI service that parses a large polyglot repo with tree-sitter, indexes it with embeddings and FAISS, generates architecture diagrams on demand, and answers natural-language questions about the codebase.
A Diátaxis taxonomy, ADRs that running code reads, evidence-first writing, and a nightly production-to-staging database refresh — how one team made documentation cheaper to keep than to skip.
Designing an Express + Better Auth service where deactivated users cannot sign in even when the database is down, tokens die on role change, and audit logging can never block a login.
An in-process cron scheduler with a generation token, a promise lock, and soft-delete reconciliation — plus the drift panel that turns destructive sync into a recoverable operation.
Designing the push-notification service: idempotency keys as mandatory input, durable in-app records before OS push, fail-open preferences, receipt reconciliation, and WebSocket auth via subprotocol.
Inside the notification scheduler: a ten-second tick over five sweeps, five-minute compare-and-swap leases, a recurrence engine with strict and non-strict personalities, and retry accounting that never double-charges.