software-engineering

Hello Dev Community! 👋 It is Day 32 of my continuous web development run, and today I jumped into a project that pushed my array manipulation and conditional logic to a whole new level: A complete Snake and Ladder Board Game using HTML5, CSS3, and Vanilla JavaScript! After building Rock Paper Scissors yesterday, I wanted to tackle a game that requires tracking persistent coordinate states across …

Every engineering team hits this conversation at some point. Someone proposes GraphQL. Someone else says REST is fine. A third person mentions gRPC and half the room goes quiet. The debate usually ends with the most senior person in the room picking what they're most familiar with. That's not a strategy — that's habit. Here's an objective breakdown of all three, when each one wins, and how to act…

Tools like Claude Code and Codex have completely reshaped how software engineering is done. This new tooling allows for much faster development and iteration, but it's important to keep the code maintainable and scalable to make sure the project can continue evolving over the long term. A template project with an initial structure using all of the technologies described here is available on GitHu…

Introduction If you've built Android apps with Room, you already think in a layered persistence model: entities define your schema, DAOs handle queries, repositories abstract the data layer, and ViewModels stay completely ignorant of the database. It's clean, testable, and scalable. When you cross to iOS and reach for local persistence, you hit a wall. Core Data is powerful but infamous for its b…

React Server Components vs. Astro Islands: When to Use Each Pattern I've shipped production code with both React Server Components (RSC) and Astro Islands. They solve the same problem—reducing JavaScript sent to browsers—but through completely different philosophies. Most developers pick wrong because they don't understand why each exists. Let me be direct: Astro Islands is better for content-hea…

If you've ever investigated a slow Rails endpoint, chances are you've encountered one of the most common performance problems in the Rails ecosystem: N+1 Queries. The scary part? Your application can appear perfectly healthy during development, pass all tests, and work flawlessly in production for months. Then one day your dataset grows, traffic increases, and suddenly an endpoint that used to re…

The Playwright Playbook — Part 2: Network Interception — The Complete Guide "Your tests should own the network — not be at its mercy." In Part 1, we fixed the foundation — proper selectors, storageState , POM, and a clean playwright.config.ts . If you haven't read that, start there. The project structure we built in Part 1 is what we're building on today. Now we go to the feature that separates i…

A realistic walkthrough of what actually happens next and where teams lose the most time. Let me describe a scene that happens hundreds of times a day across engineering teams worldwide. It's 2:47 PM. A Slack message appears: "Build failed - backend-service #1847" What happens next is where things get interesting. The notification tells you nothing useful The alert tells you the build failed. It …

Your backend Pod just crashed. Kubernetes created a new Pod with a completely different IP address. Yet your application didn't notice anything changed. How? Because applications don't talk directly to Pods. They talk to Kubernetes Services. A Service provides a stable virtual IP and DNS name, while kube-proxy quietly programs the networking rules that route traffic to the right Pods. In this pos…

As a full-stack product engineer, one of the most persistent challenges I face is managing performance bottlenecks that arise between frontend, backend, and infrastructure. While we often optimize individual layers, true efficiency demands a holistic approach. In this post, I’ll walk through a common bottleneck scenario—slow API responses impacting frontend rendering—and share practical solutions…

Most Node.js APIs start the same way. A server.js file. A few routes. Maybe an app.js if you've read a tutorial. Everything in one place because the app is small and there's no reason to complicate it yet. Then the app grows. Routes multiply. Business logic leaks into route handlers. Error handling is copy-pasted across files with slight variations. A new developer joins and spends their first we…

The problem IAM wildcards and public S3 buckets keep slipping through Terraform code review. Tools like Checkov and tfsec exist but they live in CI, require config files, and developers ignore the output because it's not where they're working. What I built TerraWatch is a GitHub App that scans every pull request that touches .tf files automatically. If it finds a security issue it blocks the merg…

There is a point in every system’s growth where adding more servers stops being enough. You scale horizontally. You introduce load balancers. You distribute traffic efficiently. And yet, something still feels off. Requests are slower than expected. Databases are under constant pressure. Systems that should scale effortlessly begin to struggle under repeated work. And then you realise something fu…

🚀 Introducing @modhamanish/rn-network-logger — A Zero-Config Network Inspector for React Native & Expo! Tired of setting up complex proxies, debugging certificates, or opening heavy desktop apps just to inspect network requests in React Native? I built a lightweight, plug-and-play network inspector that makes debugging API traffic completely effortless. 👉 Key Features: ⚡ Zero Config: Just import …

Introduction As part of my DevOps learning journey in DMI Cohort 2, I deployed the Spring Petclinic Microservices application locally using Docker Compose. Spring Petclinic is a cloud-native microservices application designed to demonstrate modern software architecture patterns. Instead of a single monolithic application, the system consists of multiple independent services that communicate with …

Software testing is usually described in two large categories: exploratory testing and automated testing. Exploratory testing is about investigation and discovery. Automated testing is about repeatable verification and regression protection. Both are well established, well documented, and widely practiced. In real projects, however, the workflow is rarely that clean. After implementing a new endp…

So you have heard about the Tailwind CSS and want to incorporate into your new project. But those inline styles look so polluted - they look similar to the old "style="font-size: 12px; color: green; font-style: italics" stuff we are told to avoid. What is going on here? Are we going back?? The Problem with Plain CSS Classes Before you run the other way, I think we have all encounter this problem …

TL;DR — Every .NET RAG project quietly ships a Python sidecar to do one job: chunk documents. I got rid of mine. DocNest .NET is an idiomatic C# / .NET 8 port of my DocNest engine — embeddings run locally (ONNX MiniLM, no key, offline), the LLM is optional (factual questions answered at zero tokens ), and the .udf knowledge base it writes is byte-compatible with the Python version . Ingest in Pyt…

Running 23 European e-commerce shops on Payload CMS v3 taught me that some things simply don't exist yet. So I built them. Background I maintain a multi-clone e-commerce infrastructure — 23 Next.js + Payload CMS v3 shops deployed across Europe, each on its own subdomain and language. Think fr.myshop.com , de.myshop.com , sk.myshop.com ... all running on the same codebase with country-specific pat…

Intro If you work with real-time financial tick data via WebSocket long connections, you’ve probably run into frustrating hidden issues: Connections show as online, but data stops flowing. Adding/removing trading symbols triggers connection storms. Minor network glitches break your data pipeline without obvious error logs. Today I’ll share a practical Python solution built around single-connectio…