Articles
Worth reading
A short take on pieces worth your time — architecture, AI, system design, and engineering careers — each one linked back to its original source.
42 articles
Caching challenges and strategies
Matt Brinkley and Jas Chhabra lay out the uncomfortable truth about caches: they don't just add latency and cost benefits, they change your system's failure modes, because a cold or unavailable cache can dump surge traffic straight onto a downstream service that was never sized for it. The taxonomy here, local vs. external, inline vs. side, and how each fails differently, is one I still reach for when reviewing a caching design. Worth reading before you add a cache "for performance" without thinking through what happens when it goes away.
Timeouts, retries, and backoff with jitter
Marc Brooker's entry in the AWS Builders' Library is the clearest explanation I've read of why naive retry logic makes outages worse, not better: synchronized retries from thousands of clients can turn a brief blip into a self-inflicted thundering herd. The fix, jittered exponential backoff paired with timeout budgets tied to real latency percentiles, is simple to state and easy to get wrong in practice. I reference this every time I review a service's failure-handling code.
Introduction - OWASP Top 10:2025
The 2025 refresh of the industry's baseline security checklist, and the shift in framing is the interesting part: less a list of individual bugs to patch, more a set of root causes — insecure design, supply chain failures, mishandling of exceptional conditions — that produce those bugs in the first place. Worth reading as a gut-check on process, not just as a scanner ruleset, especially the expanded supply-chain category given how much of a modern stack you don't actually write yourself. The baseline every engineer building anything internet-facing should know cold.
Sequenced Collections in Java
A small but overdue fix to the Java collections API: a common SequencedCollection interface that finally gives every ordered collection — List, LinkedHashSet, LinkedHashMap — first/last element access and a reversed view, without the inconsistent workarounds we've all written over the years. Not a headline feature, but exactly the kind of quality-of-life change that quietly removes a class of bugs and boilerplate from day-to-day Java code. Worth five minutes if you touch Java collections regularly and haven't caught up on 21.
OpenJDK Project Loom
A solid, practical walkthrough of virtual threads — the biggest change to how Java handles concurrency since threads themselves, letting the JVM multiplex huge numbers of blocking I/O-bound tasks onto a handful of OS threads instead of paying the memory and context-switch tax for each one. If you're still writing reactive pipelines purely to dodge thread exhaustion, this is the article that explains why that tradeoff is largely gone as of modern Java LTS releases. Baeldung's usual strength: code you can actually run, not just theory.