标签：#Engineering

Sepehr Khosravi discusses the evolution of developer productivity tools. Evaluating the strengths of tools like Cursor and Claude Code, he explains actionable techniques for senior engineers - including context engineering, custom rules, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations. He shares real-world benchmarks and strategic frameworks for balancing AI adoption with clean code quality. By Sepehr Khosravi

CAP Theorem Explained: Choosing Between Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance in Databases Imagine you're trying to book a flight online, and just as you're about to pay, the website crashes. When you try to book again, you find that the flight is now sold out, even though the website initially showed available seats. This frustrating experience is a classic example of a database trade-off between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance. The CAP theorem, first introduced by Eric Brewer in 2000, states that it's impossible for a distributed data store to simultaneously guarantee more than two out of these three principles. In this post, we'll delve into the world of CAP theorem, exploring its fundamentals, real-world database examples, and design implications. Introduction to CAP Theorem Understanding the Basics of CAP Theorem The CAP theorem is based on three primary principles: Consistency : Every read operation will see the most recent write or an error. Availability : Every request receives a response, without guarantee that it contains the most recent version of the information. Partition Tolerance : The system continues to function and make progress even when network partitions (i.e., splits or failures) occur. Importance of CAP Theorem in Distributed Systems In distributed systems, where data is spread across multiple nodes, the CAP theorem plays a crucial role in understanding the trade-offs between these principles. By grasping the CAP theorem, developers can design more resilient and scalable databases that meet the specific needs of their applications. Brief Overview of the Blog Post This post will explore the CAP theorem in depth, using real-world database examples to illustrate the trade-offs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance. We'll discuss the fundamentals of CAP theorem, examine CA, CP, and AP systems, and provide guidance on designing for each combination. By the end of this post, you'll have a solid un

After migrating Spark pipelines to Azure Kubernetes Service, two infrastructure settings interacted destructively: spark.kubernetes.local.dirs.tmpfs=true backed shuffle spill with RAM instead of disk, and a hard podAffinity rule forced all executors onto one node. Together, they caused repeated OOM kills invisible to standard diagnostics. By Pranav Bhasker

Most API teams treat the contract as an afterthought: write code, generate a spec, then watch the two drift apart. Git-native API design reverses that flow. You treat the API contract as source code, version it in Git, and review every change the same way you review application logic. Try Apidog today This guide focuses on implementation discipline, not a single tool. You’ll design contracts in branches, review them in pull requests, and turn a committed spec into mocks, tests, and docs. The goal is simple: your Git history should also be your API history. If you already know what Spec-First tooling looks like and want the product walkthrough, read the companion piece on the git-native API workflow . This article stays focused on practice. What “git-native” means for API work Git-native means your API definition lives in your repository as a plain text file. Not in a proprietary cloud database. Not behind a vendor login. A .yaml or .json file sits next to your code and is tracked by the same version control system your team already uses. In many cloud-locked API design tools, the contract lives in the vendor’s backend. You edit through a web UI, and your repository only contains an export. That export can become stale, and your Git history no longer explains how the API evolved. The git-native model inverts that relationship: The file in main is the contract. Any GUI is a view onto that file. Branches, commits, pull requests, blame, and rollback all apply to your API surface. Mocks, docs, tests, and generated clients derive from the committed spec. A git-native setup has three core properties: The spec is a text file in the repo. Changes flow through normal Git operations: branch, commit, PR, merge. Downstream artifacts derive from the committed file, not from a separate database. Why design and develop APIs in Git You already trust Git with your code. Your API contract deserves the same treatment. 1. History When someone asks, “When did we add the cursor pagination

T-SQL on Microsoft Fabric - Episode 1: Mastering Data Retrieval with SELECT, WHERE, and ORDER BY Learning Goals In this lesson, you will learn how to: Read data from tables using SELECT Filter rows with WHERE Sort query results with ORDER BY Get familiar with standard T-SQL syntax Practice directly in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse 1. Understanding Database and Schema In Fabric Warehouse, objects are commonly organized like this: Warehouse | |-- sales | |-- Customers | |-- Orders | |-- hr | |-- Employees | |-- finance |-- Transactions Schemas help you: Group related tables Manage permissions Organize large systems more effectively 2. Create a Schema Create a schema for the sales dataset: CREATE SCHEMA sales ; Check existing schemas: SELECT * FROM sys . schemas ; 3. Create Tables Create the Customers table: CREATE TABLE sales . Customers ( CustomerID INT , CustomerName VARCHAR ( 100 ), City VARCHAR ( 50 ), Country VARCHAR ( 50 ) ); Create the Orders table: CREATE TABLE sales . Orders ( OrderID INT , CustomerID INT , OrderDate DATE , Amount DECIMAL ( 10 , 2 ) ); 4. Insert Sample Data Customers INSERT INTO sales . Customers VALUES ( 1 , 'John Smith' , 'New York' , 'USA' ), ( 2 , 'Emma Brown' , 'Chicago' , 'USA' ), ( 3 , 'David Wilson' , 'London' , 'UK' ), ( 4 , 'Sophia Taylor' , 'Manchester' , 'UK' ), ( 5 , 'Michael Lee' , 'Singapore' , 'Singapore' ); Orders INSERT INTO sales . Orders VALUES ( 101 , 1 , '2026-01-10' , 1200 . 00 ), ( 102 , 1 , '2026-01-15' , 800 . 00 ), ( 103 , 2 , '2026-01-20' , 2500 . 00 ), ( 104 , 3 , '2026-02-01' , 500 . 00 ), ( 105 , 5 , '2026-02-05' , 3200 . 00 ); 5. SELECT Get all columns: SELECT * FROM sales . Customers ; Get specific columns: SELECT CustomerName , Country FROM sales . Customers ; 6. Alias Rename columns in the output: SELECT CustomerName AS Customer , Country AS Nation FROM sales . Customers ; 7. WHERE Filter rows using conditions. Customers in the USA: SELECT * FROM sales . Customers WHERE Country = 'USA' ; Orders greater than 100

There is a version of organizational life that feels, from inside, like maturity. Meetings reach conclusions. Decisions move forward without extended debate. The leadership team operates with visible coherence. Escalations are rare. When concerns are raised, they are quickly absorbed into the existing framework and resolved without disruption. Everything functions exactly as designed. That is what makes it difficult to notice that something essential has stopped occurring. The more stable the system appears, the more completely it has eliminated the conditions under which instability would be visible. The Epistemic Function of Conflict Conflict in organizations is not primarily a social problem. It is an epistemic mechanism. When a decision is challenged, something precise occurs: the decision's internal logic is forced into the open. Its assumptions are made explicit. Its evidence is tested against contrary interpretation. The challenge does not guarantee a better outcome — but it generates information the unchallenged decision never produces. Conflict is not disruption of the system. It is how the system verifies itself against reality. Remove the disagreement, and the system continues deciding. It simply stops testing whether its decisions are sound. The absence of challenge feels like confidence. It is blindness — a blindness that is, from inside, indistinguishable from clarity. What Fills the Vacuum When legitimate conflict disappears, the space does not remain empty. It fills with the performance of conflict. Meetings still contain discussion. Questions are still asked. Concerns are occasionally raised. But the texture has changed in ways that experienced practitioners feel before they can articulate. Questions are asked to signal engagement rather than to probe assumptions. Concerns are framed to demonstrate awareness rather than to force resolution. Debate occurs within the boundaries of what the system has already decided is acceptable to debate. The ritual

In this article, author Aaditya Chauhan discusses the limitations of RAG pipelines based purely on vector search and how an internal omni-search application using Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) that combines BM25 and vector results, can enhance the search solution. By Aaditya Chauhan

Switching focus from Frontend development to Data Engineering means shifting from building user interfaces to architecting robust data pipelines. It’s a completely different mindset, and the learning curve is exciting! As I dive deeper into the world of Data, these are the 4 essential tools and concepts that have become the absolute backbone of my daily learning roadmap: 1️⃣ Python (The Swiss Army Knife): Coming from JavaScript/TypeScript, picking up Python has been a breath of fresh air. From writing custom ETL scripts to data manipulation with Pandas, it's the ultimate language for data manipulation. 2️⃣ Advanced SQL (The Core): It's not just about simple SELECT statements anymore. Mastering Window Functions, CTEs (Common Table Expressions), and query optimization is where the real magic happens when interacting with Data Warehouses. 3️⃣ ETL/ELT Pipelines: Understanding how to efficiently Extract, Transform, and Load data without breaking downstream analytics. Moving from UI state management to Data state management is a game-changer. 4️⃣ Cloud Ecosystems & Modern Stack: Exploring how data flows through modern cloud environments and learning how big data tools manage scale. The transition requires patience, but applying my previous engineering background to these new tools makes the journey incredibly rewarding. 💡 To the Data Engineers in my network: What is the one tool or concept you believe is a "must-have" for someone transitioning into the field today? Drop your advice below!

A security reviewer finds a critical issue a day or two before the release of an application. While it's an important issue, it sets the team back weeks, frustrating their product management partners and customers. The review came at the most expensive time in the process. There are many examples of how work items move through different processes to deliver software in large companies. While GenAI has allowed us to rapidly create code, it also moved and exposed the bottlenecks in our processes. It has also caused us to re-examine where it is most effective to make certain decisions. This is the challenge, and a deliberate blend of automated, programmatic, and human judgment is well suited to help you solve it. We can borrow from the well-trodden path of value stream mapping here. It is useful for spotting bottlenecks and waste in a given process, but it's also valuable to ask the deeper question of who or what should own each step. Each option earns its place differently. Is there an earlier step that may reduce costs with an agent where it was previously limited by human availability? Or is the stronger determinism of a programmatic step more important for a critical piece of the flow? Some decisions should stay with human judgment, where confidence without context is a liability. The opportunity for security teams and other stakeholders is to scale their impact across these options rather than scaling headcount. Workflow-as-code is not a new idea. There are a number of existing engines where the workflow definition is its own entity, separate from the work itself. GitHub Actions defines pipelines in version-controlled files, while the execution happens on separate runners. Airflow and Temporal follow a similar pattern for data and application workflows. Because the definition lives on its own, a team can change how a given step runs without rebuilding the whole flow. That separation is what makes it practical to adjust who or what owns each step over time. Rather

Anthropic introduced Dynamic Workflows, a new capability for Claude Code designed to handle complex software engineering tasks by coordinating large numbers of AI agents within a single workflow. The feature allows Claude to dynamically create orchestration scripts, break work into subtasks, run them in parallel, and validate results before presenting a final answer. By Robert Krzaczyński

A while back I set three targets for my engineering team. Not velocity. Not story points. Not "things shipped." Just three numbers. Together they tell me whether the work is moving the way it should, or whether next week is shaping up to be a fire-fighting week. I check two of them most days. The third I used to watch closely...until we lost the tool that measured it. Here they are, and why they earned their spot. Why these and not just velocity The first metric most engineering managers reach for is velocity. Story points completed, tickets closed, work merged. Velocity is worth watching. It is a lagging indicator...it tells you what already happened...but it still shapes what comes next. When a sprint's work doesn't get finished, it rolls into the following one, and that rollover eats into whatever you had planned. What velocity doesn't tell you is how the work moved...whether it moved in a way that's going to come back and bite you. For that you need numbers that describe the shape and quality of the work, not just the amount of it...ideally ones that flag a problem while there's still time to act. These three do that. 1. Average PR size Target: under 300 lines changed per PR. What it tells me: how well the team is decomposing work. A team consistently shipping oversized PRs isn't producing more... they're producing PRs that no reviewer can read carefully. Big PRs get rubber-stamped. Rubber-stamped PRs are where production bugs hide. The 300-line target isn't magic. It's roughly the size below which most reviewers will actually read every line. I tell my team to aim for under 300 changes and to treat 500 as a hard ceiling, give or take a handful of genuine exceptions. Past 500 changes, I consistently see quality, review time, and thoroughness all drop sharply...the PR stops getting read and starts getting skimmed. When the team's average creeps up over a few weeks, I have an early signal that one of three things is happening: Stories are too coarse. The work does

You know the moment. You push the branch, open the PR, and immediately see it — the undefined return on the refund path, the token logged to the console, the TODO that was supposed to be temporary six weeks ago. The reviewer catches it four hours later and you reply "good catch, fixing now" as if someone else wrote that line. The first reviewer on most pull requests should have been the author. Half the comments you will receive — the missing null check, the untested error branch, the duplicate logic that could be extracted, the import that now goes nowhere — are things you would have caught with one more careful read-through. You skip that read because you have been in the code for two days and your brain completes the sentences for you. You see what you meant to write, not what is on the page. This post is about closing that gap with a structured AI-assisted self-review before the PR opens. Not to skip the human reviewer — to walk into the review with the obvious problems already gone, the test gaps already filled, and the PR description already written. So the reviewer's attention can land on what actually needs a second pair of eyes. The tool is branchdiff : a local browser app that runs your diff on localhost , stores everything in ~/.branchdiff/ , and keeps the AI surface controlled through an explicit branchdiff agent command API. Nothing leaves your machine until you decide to push it. Why "before the PR" is the right moment If you review after opening the PR, every AI fix becomes noise: a force-push, a re-read for your reviewer, another commit in the audit trail. If a teammate is already mid-review when you discover the bug, you look careless. The patch that should have been in the original push becomes a distraction for everyone downstream. If you review before opening the PR, the AI's output is a private workspace. You act on what matters, commit the fixes into your own history (often as fixup! commits you squash before pushing), and the PR that goes up i

Shopify introduced GraphQL Cardinal, a new execution engine replacing depth-first traversal with breadth-first execution. The redesign improves large-scale GraphQL performance with up to 15x faster field execution, 6x lower GC overhead, and +4s P50 latency gains. It focuses on execution-layer efficiency and batched resolver processing for high-cardinality commerce queries. By Leela Kumili

BadHost is a high-severity authentication bypass vulnerability in the widely used Python web framework Starlette, with 325 million weekly downloads. The flaw allows attackers to use malformed HTTP Host headers to bypass path-based access controls and access sensitive AI agent infrastructure, among other systems. By Sergio De Simone

The loop I didn't notice closing Seven weeks ago I started using AI for work. Two weeks after that, I published an article. Seven weeks after that — today — the article is one of sixteen, and they are all in a memory file that the AI reads at the start of every new conversation. I didn't notice the loop until I named it. This is a note about that loop, what it is, what it isn't, and why I keep publishing even though the loop doesn't strictly need me to. The shape It runs like this: I decide what to do. I work it out with the AI — usually in dialogue, sometimes by pasting raw code or data. The dialogue becomes a record. Sometimes a memory entry. Sometimes a published article. The record becomes context for the next conversation, which informs the next decision. It didn't look this clean while it was happening. The numbering is hindsight. From inside, the steps overlap. The first step is the one I keep. Direction is mine: what to build, what to write, what to negotiate. The history that shapes those decisions — twenty-four years of solo work, my company, my family, my health — is also mine. The AI is not setting direction. The second step is where most of the leverage is. I describe what I want to do as completely as I can, sometimes by handing over source code. Then I ask: does this look right? Is there a path I'm missing? Where would this break? I'm opening drawers — possibilities I half-saw in my own head — and checking which ones open cleanly. When one opens cleanly, that is the GO signal. Not "will this succeed" but "this is doable, so do it." The third step happens almost without effort. The conversation already exists as text. Some of it becomes a memory entry I add deliberately. Some of it becomes raw material for an article. The article writes itself partly because I have already explained the thing to the AI. The fourth step is the one that took longest to arrive — and the one I want to be most careful about describing. Three phases, not one The loop didn't

Introduction In contemporary research, the volume of biological data deposited in public repositories is growing exponentially. The Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), NCBI Gene, PubMed, and UniProt accumulate thousands of new records daily, including sequences, expression profiles, scientific articles, and functional annotations. On the one hand, this scenario represents a unique opportunity for biomedical research. On the other hand, the diversity of data formats, access protocols, and metadata models creates a significant barrier: each source requires a specific collector, distinct rate-limiting strategies, and its own validation logic. Above all, the lack of standardization in data storage compromises the reproducibility of scientific studies. The need for integrated tools capable of unifying data extraction, curation, and persistence has been widely discussed. In practice, ad hoc solutions such as isolated scripts for individual repositories generate redundant work and make maintenance difficult. First and foremost, it is necessary to establish an architecture that treats data collection as a service rather than a collection of scattered artifacts. This work presents Project 1 of the Integrated Bioinformatics Platform: a containerized Biomedical Data Collector coupled with a Data Lake. Its objective is to provide a REST API capable of triggering asynchronous data collections from the four aforementioned sources, storing immutable raw data in MinIO, and persisting metadata in PostgreSQL, all while ensuring traceability and resilience. Development The system architecture is divided into three main layers. The first is the API and orchestration layer , implemented using FastAPI. Its five endpoints — POST /collections , GET /collections , GET /collections/{id} , GET /collections/{id}/download/{dataset_id} , and GET /health — expose a clean interface for initiating and monitoring collection processes. The second layer is the collector engine , composed of abstract classe

Over the past few months, I’ve increasingly noticed something through my network: more people from non-technical backgrounds are building software as AI tooling improves. Designers are prototyping product ideas. Product managers are testing workflows. Founders are building MVPs. Operators are creating internal tools. People who would not have called themselves “technical” a year ago are now using AI to make ideas tangible. I think this is genuinely exciting. It has never been easier to create. I even attended a hackathon where participants only had 20 minutes to build a demoable product! This raises the question: When AI makes building easier, how do we make sure understanding does not disappear? I recently published Thinking in the Age of AI , a guide for software engineers (you can check out my previous post here ). That guide focused on individual reflection for engineers: how to keep developing technical intuition, reasoning, and judgment while using AI tools. But the landscape has changed quickly. AI-assisted building is no longer only an engineering workflow. It is becoming a builder workflow accessible to all. And by builders, I mean anyone using AI to turn ideas into software-like artifacts: vibe coders designers product managers founders operators marketers students non-engineering team members So I wanted to create a new version of the system for this wider builder audience. Thinking in the Age of AI: Builder Edition The opportunity is real I do not think we should dismiss this shift. I have spoken with people from all kinds of backgrounds who are actively building now. People who previously had to wait for engineering time can now create something concrete. That changes the conversation. Instead of describing an abstract idea, you can show a flow. Instead of writing a long product spec, you can prototype the interaction. Instead of asking “would this work?”, you can test a rough version. That is powerful. But there is a trap. A prototype can look much mor

A flanged pipe joint looks simple: two raised faces, a gasket between them, a ring of bolts pulling them together. Yet the gasketed bolted flange is one of the most common sources of leaks in process plants, and the reason is almost always the same — the bolts were not tightened to the right load. Too little and the joint weeps; too much and the gasket is crushed. The number that sits between those failures is the bolt preload, and it is not the same as the pressure load. This article explains how a bolted flange actually carries internal pressure, why the bolts must be preloaded well above the pressure end force, works a concrete example, and lists the mistakes that turn a sound joint into a leaking one. Why this calculation matters Bolted flange joints appear wherever a pipe or vessel has to be opened for maintenance: pump connections, valve bodies, heat exchanger shells, instrument tappings, and reactor manways. Unlike a welded joint, a flange is meant to be taken apart and reassembled, and every reassembly depends on the fitter applying the correct bolt load. The stakes are real. A leaking flange on a hazardous service can release flammable or toxic fluid. Even a benign leak wastes product and forces an unplanned shutdown. Design codes such as ASME Section VIII Appendix 2 set out a full method for sizing flange bolts, and at its heart is a comparison: the load the bolts can supply versus the load the joint demands in two distinct conditions — seating the gasket, and holding pressure. Understand the pressure end force and you understand the floor that the bolt load must clear. The core method When the line is pressurised, internal pressure acts on the fluid inside the flange and pushes the two flanges apart. The total separating force is the hydrostatic end force , the pressure acting over the area enclosed by the gasket sealing circle: H = p * (pi / 4) * G^2 Here p is the internal pressure and G is the gasket reaction (sealing) diameter — the effective circle on

Engineering managers are almost entirely absent from the AI transformation discourse. There's a structural reason for that, and understanding it is the first step to doing something about it. Engineers write on the internet. C-suite decisions make headlines. Engineering managers absorb pressure from above, complexity from below, and produce outcomes that get credited in both directions. The system doesn't reward the EM voice publicly. But the EM position gives you something that's genuinely hard to replicate: accountability for what happens to the team, combined with proximity to all three layers of the problem at once. That's not a consolation prize. It's a specific kind of leverage, if you decide to use it deliberately. You're accountable for what nobody else fully sees Writers go where the audience is or where the authority sits. EMs are neither, which is why the playbooks keep missing them. Executives get advice that assumes frictionless implementation. Engineers get advice that assumes organizational stability. At the team level, neither holds. The EM isn't the only person with this view. A good Staff or Principal Engineer often has comparable exposure — technical depth, some business context, real influence on architecture decisions. In many organizations, the senior IC has more technical credibility than the EM and less organizational noise to cut through. The difference isn't the view. It's the accountability. When something goes wrong at the team level — delivery slips, quality degrades, an engineer burns out, AI adoption produces incidents instead of velocity — the EM is the one who carries it. That asymmetry is uncomfortable. It's also what makes the EM's perspective structurally different from everyone else's. You don't just see the intersection where the playbooks break down. You're responsible for what happens there. The question isn't whether that position is valuable. It is. The question is whether you're using it actively or just absorbing it quietl

How a Product Sync Automation Project Transformed Customer Onboarding When people think about impactful engineering work, they often imagine distributed systems, high-scale infrastructure, or complex algorithms. One of the most impactful projects I worked on wasn't any of those. It was solving a seemingly simple problem: Keeping product data in sync across multiple retail systems. Years later, our CEO still remembers how much smoother customer onboarding became after this project. The Context: What is Commerce Connect? At Casa Retail AI, we have an internal platform called Commerce Connect (CC) . Commerce Connect acts as the central Product Information Management (PIM) system and serves as the source of truth for product information. Under the hood, it is built on top of a customized version of the open-source e-commerce platform Spree Commerce , extended with multi-vendor and multi-tenant capabilities. Its primary responsibility is simple: Collect product information from multiple retail ecosystems and distribute it to every Casa product that needs it. Once product data enters Commerce Connect, it is synchronized to multiple downstream systems. Why Product Data Matters Many applications inside Casa depend on product information. Product Consumers Once product data enters Commerce Connect, it is distributed to multiple systems across the Casa ecosystem. Customer-Facing Applications Several products rely on product information to provide context and improve customer experience: Lead management applications use product information during customer interactions. Ticket management systems link customer issues to specific products. Digital receipts display product names, images, and related details. Analytics & Reporting Product data powers business dashboards and reports, helping retailers answer questions such as: Which categories perform best? Which products attract the most attention? Which products generate the most complaints? It is also used for filtering and segme