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System Thinking
Every line of code is a bet against chaos.
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Attribution Systems Are Security Systems: The Cookie Stuffing Exploit and Its Production Lessons
A backend engineering deep-dive into the $35M eBay affiliate fraud: covering the HTTP semantics that made it possible, the statistical signatures that exposed it, and the distributed systems principles that should have prevented it.
Inside LinkedIn's AED System: How 6,167 Extension Probes Build a Device Dossier
A backend engineer's breakdown of LinkedIn's Active Extension Detection system: the fingerprinting pipeline, the data model, the distributed surveillance architecture, and what it means when a platform weaponizes browser primitives against its own users.
NASA’s Rules for Code That Can’t Fail: Revisited for AI-Generated Systems
Applying NASA's legendary JPL flight software discipline to modern backend infrastructure and the era of AI-generated code.
The Database You Install vs. The Database You Run: SQLite Is Not a Smaller PostgreSQL
A systems-level breakdown of SQLite and PostgreSQL: concurrency models, WAL mechanics, failure modes, and when the conventional wisdom is wrong.
SQL Window Functions in Production: What the Tutorials Don't Tell You
Window functions aren't just a cleaner syntax for analytics. Understanding their execution model, cost profile, and failure modes is what separates a working query from one that takes down your reporting replica.
The Bathtub Principle: Stocks, Flows, and Distributed System Failure
Why distributed systems fail isn't usually a code quality problem. It's a failure to model stocks, flows, feedback loops, and leverage points under real production load.