Technical memos on databases, caching, formats, and engineering tooling.
Vector databases went from niche ML infrastructure to mainstream developer tool in about eighteen months, driven entirely by the LLM boom. If you are building …
TL;DR: Vector databases store and query high-dimensional embeddings for similarity search. Dedicated vector …
The database landscape in 2026 is simultaneously more mature and more confusing than it has ever been. SQL databases have adopted features that were once NoSQL …
TL;DR: SQL databases remain the right choice for most applications. Document databases solve specific …
The microservices pendulum has swung back toward the center. After a decade of conference talks promoting microservices as the default architecture, the …
TL;DR: Start with a monolith. Extract services only when you have a specific scaling, deployment, or team …
Serverless has been production-ready for years, but the discourse around it still oscillates between “the future of everything” and “just …
TL;DR: Serverless APIs eliminate infrastructure management and scale automatically. The tradeoffs are cold …
Object storage is the unexciting infrastructure that everything depends on. Static assets, backups, data lake files, user uploads, build artifacts — if it is a …
TL;DR: S3 is the safe default with the deepest ecosystem. R2 wins on egress cost. Azure Blob integrates …
Edge computing has moved from marketing buzzword to practical infrastructure. In 2026, every major cloud and CDN provider offers some flavor of “run code …
TL;DR: Edge computing puts code close to users, cutting latency dramatically for read-heavy workloads. But …
If you have read the basics of HTTP caching — Cache-Control headers, ETags, max-age — and want to know what comes next, this note is for you. Modern web …
TL;DR: Modern caching is a layered system: browser cache, service worker, CDN edge, and origin. Getting the …
HTTP/3 has been the “next big thing” in web performance for years. By 2026, it is no longer next — it is the default transport for most major CDNs …
TL;DR: HTTP/3 eliminates head-of-line blocking at the transport layer and reduces connection setup time. …
Choosing an API architecture is one of those decisions that feels like it should be straightforward but generates surprisingly heated debates. REST has been the …
TL;DR: REST is the safe default for most public APIs. GraphQL shines when clients need flexible queries …
This note explains how to read RFCs without drowning in them, which RFCs are most relevant for web developers, and the conventions that make these documents …
TL;DR: RFCs are the source of truth for internet protocols. They're dense but navigable once you know the …
This note covers the practical use of SVG for technical diagrams in developer documentation. It walks through the advantages over raster formats, accessible SVG …
TL;DR: SVG diagrams render crisply at any size, are accessible to screen readers, and can be styled with …
This note covers the three main approaches to storing binary data alongside MySQL — inline BLOBs, external file references, and hybrid patterns — with specific …
TL;DR: BLOB columns work for small objects under 1MB. Beyond that, store on disk and keep a pointer. The …
This note covers the HTTP caching headers that matter for static sites, how CDN edge caching interacts with browser caching, and the specific configuration that …
TL;DR: Set long max-age for hashed assets, short max-age + revalidation for HTML. Let the CDN handle the …