Blog Posts

Home /
Blog Posts

Practical System Design: The Quiet Elegance of Boring Architecture

Junior engineers often assume that impressive system design requires a complex web of microservices, event streaming through Apache Kafka, CQRS patterns, and distributed consensus mechanisms running across every cluster.

How I Keep Myself Alive Using Golang: Automated Incident Management for Type 1 Diabetes

How many grams of carbohydrates are in a pint of beer or a seemingly healthy salad? For most people, the answer is “who cares,” unless they are following a strict diet. But for approximately 8 million people living with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) worldwide, this is a continuous, daily life-or-death question.

Lies We Tell Ourselves to Keep Using Golang

In the backend engineering community, Golang (Go) is frequently praised for its radical simplicity. From microservices at Google, Uber, and Grab to core infrastructure projects like Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform, Go seems to be everywhere. Engineers routinely swap familiar praises: “Go is dead simple to learn,” “Concurrency in Go is practically free thanks to Goroutines,” and “The Go toolchain compiles instantly into a single self-contained binary.”

When an Autonomous AI Agent Left Its Owner a $6,500 AWS Bill Scanning DN42

Over the past few days, the DevOps and networking communities have been buzzing about a rather tragicomic incident. An operator confidently gave an autonomous AI agent an AWS API key with full administrator access. The mission seemed simple: join and scan DN42. A few days later, the operator woke up to a $6,531.30 AWS invoice, declared bankruptcy, and took to the DN42 mailing lists and Matrix channels begging for cryptocurrency donations.

Agnes AI vs The 2026 AI Lineup: Benchmarking Against DeepSeek V4, ChatGPT 5.6, Gemini 3.6, and GLM 5.2

Tech , Ai

The global AI ecosystem in mid-2026 is experiencing fierce multi-polar competition. Western tech titans continue to push massive frontier models with OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5.6 and Google’s Gemini 3.6. Across the Pacific, Chinese AI labs are exerting immense pressure with DeepSeek V4, GLM 5.2 (Zhipu AI), and Kimi (Moonshot AI).

Gemini 3.6 Flash & Tiered Thinking: Did Google Forget Gemini 3.5 Pro?

Tech , Ai

Google quietly updated its AI ecosystem with the release of Gemini 3.6 Flash. This update not only brings blazing-fast response speeds and optimized inference costs but also introduces a brand-new reasoning configuration option in the API and Google AI Studio: Tiered Thinking.

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.

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.

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.

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).