We share engineering research, architecture notes, and honest field reports from systems we've designed, broken, and rebuilt. No vendor content. No thought-leadership filler — only the reasoning we'd want to read ourselves.
Retrieval-augmented generation is well understood in research environments. In production, the failure modes compound quietly: stale indexes, embedding drift, context poisoning, and latency cliffs. This field report walks through the architectural safeguards we now treat as non-negotiable before any RAG system ships.
Allowing arbitrary schema evolution is a short-term convenience that becomes a long-term liability. We examine the failure patterns and when strict schema governance actually accelerates delivery.
Federated identity across providers introduces coordination overhead that most teams underestimate. A structured walkthrough of patterns that avoid credential sprawl without sacrificing developer velocity.
Event sourcing promises a perfect audit trail, but the reality of eventual consistency means subtle invariant violations. We trace how to reason about linearizability guarantees in distributed append-only stores.
AI-powered API surfaces introduce an entirely new class of injection and exfiltration risks. This note surveys prompt-based attack vectors and documents defense-in-depth patterns from our own deployments.
Column-store databases can be staggeringly fast or pathologically slow depending on predicate placement. A practical guide to query profiling that surfaces optimizer blind spots before they become production incidents.
General-purpose embedding models underperform on narrow technical vocabularies. This post describes a reproducible evaluation harness and the selection criteria we apply when building retrieval pipelines for specialized domains.
Infrequent and technical. We publish only when we have something worth saying — usually one or two pieces per month, straight to your inbox.
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