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System Thinking
Every line of code is a bet against chaos.
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AI-Assisted Exploit Discovery and the New Patch-Latency Budget
What the Apple M5 Memory Integrity Enforcement bypass says about production security engineering, distributed systems failure modes, and the shrinking time between vulnerability discovery and operational exposure.
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.