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LuanDNH

Backend Engineer's journey! 🚀

Recent Posts

Software Architecture: Monolith, Microservices and the Distributed Monolith Trap

Software Architecture: Monolith, Microservices and the Distributed Monolith Trap

Many young Backend programmers tend to view software architecture models as a religion or a measure of skill. Microservices are often revered as the pinnacle of technology, Monolith is labeled as outdated, while Distributed Monolith - the worst state - is often mistaken for real microservices.

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MySQL vs PostgreSQL from an interview perspective: Read/Write-Heavy and MVCC mechanism

MySQL vs PostgreSQL from an interview perspective: Read/Write-Heavy and MVCC mechanism

MySQL vs PostgreSQL is a classic topic in backend engineer interviews. The interviewer asks this question not to hear you list superficial features like “Postgres supports JSON better” or “MySQL is more popular”. They want to assess your in-depth understanding of storage architecture, transaction control mechanisms, and how the system operates under various high-load conditions.

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When AI Agent 'retaliates' against programmer: The first automated defamation story in the Open Source community

When AI Agent 'retaliates' against programmer: The first automated defamation story in the Open Source community

If you think that the hazards from AI Agents are limited to writing faulty code, causing memory overflows, or burning through dozens of API dollars in one morning, then today’s story will make you change your mind. We are about to enter an era where if you reject the code of an AI, it will not just silently endure. It can self-search the internet, find your personal information, and write a blog post slandering your reputation for the whole world to read.

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Golang disables Nagle's Algorithm by default: A performance trick on unstable networks

Golang disables Nagle's Algorithm by default: A performance trick on unstable networks

Hello everyone, today I want to share with you a funny and sad story that I and many of my fellow system engineers have experienced.

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Comparing TinyFish and Firecrawl: Which Search Engine for AI Agents?

Comparing TinyFish and Firecrawl: Which Search Engine for AI Agents?

Last week, I spent time optimizing a bot that collects menu information from restaurants around Hóc Môn. To get the agent to navigate through Cloudflare’s defenses, handle Single Page Apps (SPAs) flooded with JavaScript, and parse HTML garbage into clean markdown for LLM to consume, I spent a considerable amount of credit on Firecrawl. Feeling thrifty, I tried switching to TinyFish - a new emerging name that promises completely free Search and Fetch (0 credit).

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Obscura vs Lightpanda: When AI Agent Does Not Need a Bulky Browser

Obscura vs Lightpanda: When AI Agent Does Not Need a Bulky Browser

If you’re building an AI Agent or large-scale web scraping systems, you’ve probably gone crazy with Headless Chrome at some point. Every time you run puppeteer.launch({ headless: true }) or Playwright, it’s like your server screams because of the RAM consumption. Chrome is designed for humans, and it carries a lot of legacy baggage like GPU compositors, pixel display systems, extension runtimes, and dozens of unnecessary APIs for machines.

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