Blog — Vishnu Balachandran

Blog

Original writing on architecture, event-driven systems, reliability and engineering careers — drawn from production work on banking and high-traffic platforms, with the numbers and the trade-offs left in.

5 articles

Living Architecture Docs as RAG-Like Context for AI Coding Agents

Two markdown files, updated in the same commit as the code, turn an AI coding agent from guessing at your codebase's intent into actually knowing it — no vector database required. Here is the pattern, working, on this project.

Sep 21, 2026 By Vishnu Balachandran AI EngineeringSystem DesignEngineering Practice

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Deliberate Skills, Ownership, and Seeing the Whole Product

Seven years from Software Engineer R&D to Lead Product Engineer, and the three things that actually moved it: learning on a structured path instead of by accident, taking ownership of problems nobody assigned, and understanding the product rather than just my service.

Sep 20, 2026 By Vishnu Balachandran Career & LeadershipEngineering PracticeJava & Spring

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Leading Engineers: Making SOLID and CQRS Actually Stick

Principles do not cut defect rates. Agreement about where behaviour belongs does. How mentoring 10+ engineers into consistent SOLID and CQRS adoption cut defect leakage 40%, and why most of that work was not technical.

Sep 14, 2026 By Vishnu Balachandran Career & LeadershipEngineering PracticeSystem DesignJava & Spring

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Upgrading Spring Boot Across 20+ Microservices and Clearing 15+ CVEs

Nobody schedules a framework upgrade, so it becomes an emergency. Leading a Spring Boot upgrade across 20+ services that eliminated 15+ CVEs: why the order of the upgrade matters more than the work in each service.

Sep 5, 2026 By Vishnu Balachandran SecurityJava & SpringCI/CDCloud & KubernetesEngineering Practice

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A 10x Latency Reduction That Started With a Profiler, Not a Rewrite

The optimisation I was sure would work did nothing. What produced a 10x improvement was measuring first and discovering the cost was in how the ORM loaded data, not in the code I had been reading.

Sep 2, 2026 By Vishnu Balachandran PerformanceJava & SpringData EngineeringEngineering Practice

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