Earlier this year I got interested in so called “dark agent factories” and tried to build one. I’m kinda centric among AI Hype and from my perspective coding definitely isn’t “solved” yet. But it’s also pretty obvious that AI agents can be super useful in day-to-day work. For sure for seasoned pros and not without…
Max Performance of Nginx, PHP & PostgreSQL Chain — Again aka Part #2
This blog post is the second part in a series on performance engineering (PE) research, check this link for the first one. We look into max performance of Nginx, PHP & PostgreSQL chain — again! A bit of Refresher on Max Performance of Nginx, PHP & PostgreSQL Chain See “Setup for Max Performance of Nginx,…
Code Modularity: Practical Tips
For a while, I’ve been a core contributor and maintainer of an internal project at the company I now work for. Code modularity is a desired trait for any codebase which is not dead. For context, the project is written in Python. As you may guess from my other articles here, Python is a language…
Why Everyone Is Falling for the AI Pitch
So it’s time for probably the most useless article on this blog ))) It’s been more than two months since the last article, and I can’t get my … stuff together to write another one. Why everyone is falling for the AI pitch? Let’s vent a little for a change. Everyone is a Celebrity Today’s…
NFR Conflicts: 3 practical cases
Over time I noticed some typical contradictions between non-functional requirements (NFR). Let’s consider three typical cases of NFR conflicts I learned from practice. Security vs Ease of Use Security is a huge and ever growing concern these days. No surprise here – we live when IT-systems are unprecedentedly dependable. More and more activities occur in…
Max Performance of Nginx, PHP & PostgreSQL Chain
This blog post is the first in a series of articles on performance engineering (PE) research I did some time ago. I touched the topic of PE a bit in one of previous blog articles. This time it’ll be purely practical. The picture was generated by Nano Banana and contains pretty obvious errors. I decided…
Feature, Solution and Platform Engineering
This post would probably be longer than usual. I’ve been pondering the concept I’m going to cover in it for a while already. It all was ignited by the initiative to slice and dice workforce at the company I work now into a small, delivery oriented teams. The idea per se isn’t bad at all…
Mental Models for Performance Engineering
I’ve been tinkering with performance engineering (PE) as one of the areas of interest for a while lately. From experience I built up a few mental models / metaphors which help with reasoning about systems performance. Let’s get through these mental models for performance engineering one by one. The most significant achievement thus far was…
Unsettling story of proxy_next_upstream in Nginx
It turns out that there’s quite a bunch of people who bumped into a particular Nginx upstream handling behavior. Not that long ago I also joined the club. It usually manifests as unavailability of some service behind Nginx as a reverse proxy. Clients start to get “502 Bad Gateway” after some change in the service…
Tribute to the Blog of Uwe Friedrichsen
At the end of November last year I bumped into a blog which immediately captured my attention. I eagerly read during a few weeks after as the blog turned out to be a treasury of value =) Articles are nicely interconnected with each other, so it’s easy to fall into a rabbithole of great content…