
Docker for Backend Engineers Who Aren't DevOps
Most backend engineers learn Docker by copying a Dockerfile from the internet, running it locally, and moving on. That works until it doesn't — images that are 2GB when they should be 200MB, builds th

The team set min_instances = 3 to eliminate cold starts on the AI workflow service. Reasonable thinking — LLM calls already add 5–15 seconds of latency, a 4-second cold start on the first request afte

The test checked whether the extracted invoice total matched the expected value. It passed nine times out of ten. On the tenth run, the model formatted the number differently — "1,234.56" instead of "

Redis gets reached for because it's fast. That's often the wrong reason. Speed isn't a pattern — it's a property. Using Redis correctly means understanding what each pattern is actually good at and, j

The monthly bill was ten times the estimate. Investigation took two hours. Three things were wrong. A retry loop was calling the model on every validation error — including schema mismatches that woul

The document extraction endpoint was synchronous. A request came in, the service sent the document to OpenAI, waited for the full response, parsed it, wrote to the database, and returned. Each request

Most engineers using GitHub Actions daily know how to write a basic workflow — checkout, install dependencies, run tests, deploy. That covers 80% of what they need. The other 20% is a set of features