P.01Most teams default to cache-aside without asking if it's right. How cache-aside, write-through, and write-behind behave under real traffic, and how to pick.
P.02CAP theorem forces a consistency-versus-availability choice during a network partition, not all the time. Here is what it constrains and how to pick a model.
P.03One developer rebuilt Postgres in Rust with AI agents in under three months, and pgrust now matches 18.3 across 46,000+ regression queries. What it isn't.
P.04Deno Sandbox spins up isolated Firecracker microVMs in under 200ms for running code you don't trust, AI-agent output included. Here's how it works and a working example.
P.05GitHub cut token spend in its agentic CI workflows up to 62% by pruning unused MCP tools and swapping tool calls for CLI commands. How to copy the technique.
P.06Webhooks push the moment something happens; polling asks repeatedly. How to decide, with code for both, and the hybrid most production systems land on.
P.07A distributed lock stops two processes on separate machines from touching the same resource at once. Here's how Redis, ZooKeeper, and fencing tokens work.
P.08Round robin, least connections, and consistent hashing route traffic differently. Here's when each load balancing algorithm fits, with a hash ring example.
P.09Exponential backoff plus jitter stops retries from turning a blip into an outage. Working code, what not to retry, and how to bound the loop.
P.10Sharding splits one database across many machines. The strategy you pick decides whether you get hot spots, painful resharding, or something that scales.
P.11All three move messages between services, but answer different questions about delivery, replay, and who reads what. The decision, and the failure modes.
P.12Writing to your database and publishing an event are two operations, and a crash between them loses data silently. How the transactional outbox closes it.