Posts

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.

Architecting Distributed Vector Databases: Scaling Semantic Search from Prototype to Production

How to design, partition, replicate, and operate a distributed vector database for semantic search at scale — covering sharding strategies, HNSW vs. IVF, hybrid retrieval, and operational pitfalls.

Layered diagram of a key-value store with WAL, memtable, SSTables, and compaction.

Building a Mini LSM-Tree Key-Value Store in Rust: A CV-Grade Systems Project

Build a runnable LSM-tree key-value store with a write-ahead log in Rust, from WAL append to SSTable flush to compaction. The exact project to make your CV read like a database engineer’s.

Layered diagram of kernel submission and completion rings for async I/O.

Mastering io_uring vs epoll: A Deep Dive into Linux Async I/O Architectures

Compare Linux’s two dominant async I/O architectures, io_uring and epoll, with kernel internals, real benchmarks, and patterns drawn from production systems.