Somebody opens a photo in Photoshop, erase a tiny scratch in the background, save, and post it online thinking nobody will notice, and nobody notices, looking at it with the eye. Except the camera noise noticed, and it is going to tell. This post is about how a classical signal-processing technique, with zero lines of … Read more
The mysqldump finished without complaining about a single line, and for a second you get that calm of someone who thinks the job is done. Then the file gets pointed at the shiny new RDS instance, enter is pressed with confidence, and the import dies on the very first function with an error about a … Read more
In this post I describe how I create a on-premise solution to handle with videos that needs scenes segmented, faces identified, subtitles generated, thumbnails picked, metadata pulled into the catalog. This post is about how we stopped trying to win that math with people and started winning it with our own AI. TL;DR: How SOFA … Read more
For years I was the person keeping an ASP.NET WebForms app alive. It ran the whole business: sales reps, their orders, commissions, the companies they represent. It also ran exclusively on Windows, leaned on a DevExpress control suite from 2011, and printed its reports through an engine that refused to build anywhere except one very … Read more
Your site runs fine on Nginx, the DNS points where it should, port 80 is open, and yet the browser still slaps a “Not secure” label right next to your domain. Visitors see it, you see it, it judges you. Back in the day, fixing this meant buying a certificate from some authority and wiring … Read more
Every API call your app makes goes through a protocol stack that determines whether that data can be intercepted. Most developers know what HTTPS is, but fewer understand the actual relationship between HTTP, HTTPS, SSL, and TLS, and why the distinction matters when you’re configuring servers, handling certificates, or debugging connection errors. TL;DR: Understand the … Read more
Node.js has a rich ecosystem but its own patterns that differ significantly from synchronous languages. The event loop, streams, modules, async patterns, and the npm ecosystem all have their own rules. This post covers the ones that show up repeatedly in real backend development. TL;DR: A Node.js reference covering the event loop, async patterns, streams, … Read more
REST works fine until it doesn’t. When you have service-to-service communication that needs low latency, binary efficiency, or streaming, you hit REST’s ceiling quickly. gRPC solves this with Protocol Buffers for compact serialization and HTTP/2 for multiplexed transport. TL;DR: Build a Python gRPC service with unary RPC and streaming, from proto file definition to client/server … Read more
REST APIs have a fixed shape problem: clients either get too much data or have to make multiple requests to get what they need. GraphQL flips that, the client declares exactly what it wants and the server delivers exactly that. No extra fields, no N+1 requests to stitch together related data. TL;DR: Set up a … Read more
MongoDB’s document model removes most of the schema ceremony that comes with relational databases, but it introduces its own rules around data modeling, indexing, and querying. If you come from SQL and just wing it, you will end up with queries that are slow for reasons that aren’t obvious at all. TL;DR: A practical MongoDB … Read more