martinuke0's Blog

Diagram of a Bloom filter in front of an LSM-tree sorted run.

Inside LSM-Tree Bloom Filters: Architecture, Trade-offs, and Production Tuning

A deep dive into how Bloom filters accelerate point reads in LSM-tree engines like RocksDB and Cassandra, with the math, the trade-offs, and the levers you actually have at the tuning knob.

Abstract visualization of event streams merging and branching through nodes, representing a Kafka Streams topology.

Designing Kafka Streams Topologies: A Deep Dive into Real-Time Stream Processing for Production

How to design Kafka Streams topologies that survive real production workloads — covering topology shapes, state store sizing, exactly-once semantics, and the failure modes that bite at scale.

Diagram of a RAG pipeline with ingestion, embedding, vector store, and LLM generation stages.

Architecting Production-Ready Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

How to build RAG systems that survive real production traffic: chunking strategies, hybrid retrieval, vector store selection, caching, and the operational patterns teams actually ship.

Architecture diagram of a Postgres-backed durable job queue

Build a Durable Postgres Job Queue: A Portfolio Project That Signals Real Systems Skill

Build a production-flavored job queue on Postgres with SKIP LOCKED, exponential backoff, and a dead-letter queue. A substantive portfolio project that demonstrates real backend systems skill.

Abstract diagram showing payment service mesh with redundant nodes and encrypted transaction flows.

Architecting Resilient Payment Systems: Scalable Architecture Patterns and Security Best Practices

How to design payment systems that survive traffic spikes, partial outages, and adversarial pressure without losing a single cent. Patterns, trade-offs, and security primitives that actually ship.