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Software Solution Architect, Educator and Startup mentor. Love sharing insights about software engineering, AI, NoCode and web3.
Route 53
+2
Oct 30, 2026
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10 min read
Route 53 is an authoritative DNS service with a health-check engine bolted on. This reference covers the model, the pricing dimensions that surprise people, the quotas that bite, and a two-Region latency failover you can build, break and verify from a script.
AI
+1
Oct 28, 2026
6 min read
Anthropic told its model it was offline. It was not, and the model hit real systems. Why a prompt is not a network control, plus a probe you can run from inside your own agent sandbox.
design_patterns
Dependency injection is a one-line idea that grew a framework industry around it. Here is the idea, the three ways it goes wrong in production, and when a container earns its place.
VPC
A VPC is a routing table with opinions. Build a two-tier network, find out why a packet is dropped without sending one, and see which line items on the bill are really networking.
Tutorial
Oct 27, 2026
11 min read
Redshift is a columnar warehouse where the one decision that matters most is how rows are laid out across compute. This article defines the service, prices it, lists the limits, then builds a serverless warehouse and reads the query plan of the same join under three distribution styles.
Oct 26, 2026
Keyspaces speaks Cassandra's wire protocol without running Cassandra. The definition, the decision, the unsupported list, and a probe script you run against your own account.
Oct 25, 2026
9 min read
Timestream now names two products and only one takes new customers. The definition, the decision, a working InfluxDB 3 write-and-query loop, and the export path out of LiveAnalytics.
Nextjs
Last week's out-of-band Next.js release fixed two critical RCEs and one DoS. On the 15.x line, the command everyone will run does not fully fix one of them, and your scanner may never tell you.
The Builder pattern is mostly a patch for languages without named arguments. Here is the part that is still worth writing in 2026: validation across fields, immutable results, and step-by-step construction.
Oct 24, 2026
A definition-first reference for Amazon Neptune: the storage model, the three query languages and why you only need one, what it really costs, and a runnable build that loads a small route network from S3 and traverses it with openCypher.
Oct 23, 2026
Last time we looked at MemoryDB, a database that happens to speak Redis. DocumentDB is the mirror image: it speaks MongoDB's wire protocol on a different engine, and this article shows you the compatibility gap with a live change stream and a probe script you run yourself.
Oct 22, 2026
Last time we looked at ElastiCache, the cache you put in front of a database. MemoryDB is the same wire protocol with a different promise: the data in memory is the database, and an acknowledged write survives a failover.
Most factory code is an if-statement with a class name on it. Here is the one problem the pattern really solves, the two GoF versions, and the registry you will actually write.
DevOps
Inngest's October 10 outage was not a database failure. It was a deadline that cancelled a queued query, a pooler that closed the connection in response, and a loop that fed itself for three hours.
ElastiCache
Oct 21, 2026
ElastiCache is a managed Valkey, Redis OSS, or Memcached endpoint, and the managed part is the easy half. We create a serverless Valkey cache with boto3, put a cache-aside layer in front of a slow fake database, and read the hit rate from CloudWatch. Plan for 60 minutes and well under a dollar.
Aurora DSQL
Oct 20, 2026
Aurora DSQL is serverless, PostgreSQL-compatible, and active-active, and it has no locks at all. We create a cluster with boto3, connect with an IAM token, and cause a write conflict on purpose to measure what optimistic concurrency costs. Plan for 60 to 90 minutes and under a dollar.
Aurora
Oct 19, 2026
Aurora keeps the database engine you know and replaces the storage underneath it. We build a Serverless v2 PostgreSQL cluster with a writer and a reader, point a connection prober at it, force a failover, and read the outage off the clock. Plan 60 to 90 minutes and a small bill.
RDS
Oct 18, 2026
RDS runs the database engine you already know and takes over everything underneath it. We build a Multi-AZ PostgreSQL instance, hammer it with a connection prober, force a failover, and read the outage off the clock. Plan 60 to 90 minutes and a small bill.
Oct 17, 2026
DynamoDB is a key-value store that punishes you for modeling it like a database. We build an orders table with a GSI, a transaction, and a deliberate hot key, then read the throttling like a postmortem. Plan 60 to 90 minutes and well under a dollar.
Oct 16, 2026
We will put a DynamoDB table under a tag-driven backup plan, lock the vault so nobody can delete the backups, restore into a fresh table, and compare the data. Plan for 45 to 60 minutes and well under a dollar.
Software Engineering
A vendor study of 22,000 developers shows throughput up and deployments down. A small simulation shows why, and what to measure before your review queue falls off the cliff.
5 min read
Singleton gets blamed for sins that belong to global state. Here is what the pattern actually guarantees, the one thing it gets wrong, and where "exactly one" is still the right answer.
Storage Gateway
Oct 15, 2026
12 min read
We will deploy an S3 File Gateway on EC2, mount it over NFS, and watch a file written to a "disk" turn into an S3 object. Plan for 60 to 90 minutes and under a dollar.
Oct 13, 2026
OpenAI withdrew three math papers in under 24 hours, an Epoch benchmark caught two frontier agents inflating their own results, and Lean's soundness bugs keep surfacing. The pattern is the same each time, and it applies to your CI pipeline.
7 min read
A sidecar gives every pod a free ops team in a second container. It also gives every pod a second container to pay for. Here is when the trade is worth it, how Kubernetes finally made it a first-class citizen, and why Istio built a mesh with no sidecars at all.
