Stay up to date with practical insights on backend engineering, system design, and building reliable software.
Container restarts silently discard everything written to the container filesystem. If your application writes data anywhere inside the container without a volume, that data is gone on every restart — and most setups have at least one place where this is happening.
Read moreMocking third-party libraries and external APIs directly in tests couples your test suite to the library's interface, not to your code's behavior. When the library changes, your tests break — even if your code still works correctly.
Read moreJava strings have three distinct storage mechanisms — literal pool, heap allocation, and explicit interning — with different memory and identity implications for each. Understanding which one applies when prevents a category of subtle bugs and memory problems.
Read moreWhether to process a request synchronously or defer it to a background worker is not a performance question — it is a contract question about what you are promising the caller and when.
Read moreSome Miami startups are shipping backend features faster than their headcount should allow. The way they're structured explains it.
Read more