A LinkedIn recruiter pitched me a remote "Software Engineer at a DEX" project this week. Reasonable comp range, tech stack squarely in my wheelhouse. After a couple of friendly exchanges, she asked me to "review the codebase before the technical interview" and sent me a GitHub repo link plus a Calendly invite for the call. The repo was malware. It didn't get me, but it's something developers shoul
“We have failover.” That sounds reassuring. But when real failure hits… many systems still go down — hard. Why? Because failover is easy to configure — but extremely hard to make reliable at global scale. Here are the most common ways failover fails in production: RDS Multi-AZ enabled Kubernetes failover configured Looks good on paper. Reality: Takes minutes instead of seconds Gets stuc
TL;DR: I built ChessDada — a free multiplayer chess platform inspired by old Yahoo Chess. No signup, no download, just instant browser-based chess. Built with Node.js, Socket.IO, and chess.js. Modern chess sites are bloated. Chess.com forces you through signup. Lichess defaults to account creation. The "5-second click and play" experience that made Yahoo Chess legendary in the 2000s is essentially
SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE & REFACTORING 3 Domain-Centric Architectures Every Software Architect Should Know The first concern of the architect is to make sure that the house is usable; it is not to ensure that the house is made of brick. — Uncle Bob The expression domain is occurring in software bibles for a very long time now and is heavily discussed in the book Domain-Driven
How we moved from a fragile loop-based payout system to a reliable, idempotent, and traceable architecture. On paper, payouts sound simple: Customer places an order Platform collects payment Platform pays the seller That's it. Until you try to do it at scale. In any marketplace or fintech system, money flows across multiple parties: Sellers / vendors Delivery partners Platform fees Discounts, vouc
Is your website throwing 502 errors whenever an external API starts lagging? It is a common engineering grind where slow dependencies choke your server and kill your response times. The fix is not adding more resources. It is about changing how you handle work. Stop making users wait for external processes to finish. Offload heavy tasks to background jobs and queues. Distinguish between workers
The EU's Digital Product Passport (DPP) requirement is moving from regulatory text to technical reality. Under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), products sold in the EU must carry a DPP—a machine-readable identifier linking to standardized lifecycle data. For developers and compliance teams, 2026 marks the year where pilot programs transition to real deployments. Here's wha
TL;DR: I built a P2P file transfer tool that runs entirely in the browser. No install, no server relay, no account. Here's what I learned about WebRTC data channels, resumable transfers, and the browser storage mess along the way. Most file transfer tools follow the same pattern: upload to a server, get a link, the recipient downloads from that server. Your file sits on someone else's infrastructu