Blog

Articles on backend development, AWS cloud, DevOps, CI/CD, and system design.

• Case Study: Mess Monitor — Serverless on a Student Budget

  23 May 2026 · Serverless · AWS · Mobile

  How my expense-splitting app went from a fix for my own student mess to 10K+ downloads and 700+ daily users on a backend that costs almost nothing: Flutter, API Gateway, Lambda, and a single-table DynamoDB design, with the month-end settlement algorithm that ends household arguments.

• Case Study: The Architecture Behind HoneyBee ERP

  18 Apr 2026 · ERP · NestJS · Architecture

  A deep dive into the modular ERP platform I build at HoneyBee IoT: why a modular monolith beats microservices for ERP, module boundaries with a shared kernel, scope-aware RBAC, real-time updates over WebSockets with Redis pub/sub, and the caching layers that keep reports fast.

• Scaling Databases: Replication, Sharding, and Caching in Practice

  20 Mar 2026 · System Design · Database · Scalability

  Most systems don't die from too much code. They die from one overloaded database. The scaling ladder I follow in practice: indexing and query fixes first, then read replicas, then caching with Redis, and only then sharding, with the failure modes each step introduces along the way.

• Designing a Rate Limiter: A Practical System Design Walkthrough

  12 Dec 2025 · System Design · Backend · Scalability

  The rate limiter is a system design classic because it packs real distributed-systems tradeoffs into a small problem. Token bucket vs sliding window, where the limiter lives in your architecture, keeping counters in Redis, and what changes when you go from one server to twenty.

• Monitoring Microservices with Prometheus and Grafana

  5 Sep 2025 · DevOps · Monitoring · Microservices

  You can't fix what you can't see. How I set up Prometheus and Grafana to monitor a multi-service Laravel platform: the four golden signals, exporters worth installing, alert rules that page for symptoms instead of causes, and the dashboard layout my team actually uses during incidents.

• Docker Multi-Stage Builds: From 1.2GB Images to 90MB

  10 Jun 2025 · Docker · DevOps · CI/CD

  Our PHP and Node images were over a gigabyte, and every deploy paid for it in pull time and registry storage. Multi-stage builds cut them by more than 90%. A walkthrough of the technique, the layer-caching rules that make builds fast, and the base-image choices that actually matter.

• AWS VPC Networking Explained: Subnets, Route Tables, and NAT

  22 Apr 2025 · AWS · Cloud · Networking

  VPC networking is where most cloud engineers' mental models break down. This post builds one from scratch: public vs private subnets, route tables, internet and NAT gateways, and security groups vs NACLs, ending with the three-tier network layout I use as a default for production workloads.

• EC2 vs ECS vs Lambda: Choosing the Right Compute on AWS

  18 Feb 2025 · AWS · Cloud · Architecture

  Every AWS project starts with the same question: where should this code actually run? A practical decision framework for picking between EC2, ECS, and Lambda based on workload shape, traffic patterns, cost, and operational overhead, with real examples from production systems I've run on all three.

• How I Cut API Deployment Time by 60% Using GitHub Actions & Docker

  4 Jan 2025 · CI/CD · Docker · DevOps

  A step-by-step breakdown of the CI/CD pipeline I implemented at Orange Business Development that reduced deployment time from 25 minutes to under 10 minutes with zero-downtime releases. Covers Docker containerisation, self-hosted runners, environment secrets management, and rollback strategies.

• Building a Multi-District Government System with Laravel Microservices

  28 Oct 2024 · Laravel · Microservices · Backend

  How our team built and deployed the RDCD Beneficiary Training Management System, a microservice-based platform serving 50,000+ beneficiaries across multiple districts under the Ministry of Local Government. Covers architecture decisions, CI/CD pipeline setup with GitHub Actions, and lessons learned.

• AWS Cloud Practitioner: My Study Plan and Key Takeaways

  15 Mar 2024 · AWS · Cloud · Certification

  Passed the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam in January 2024. In this post I share the exact study plan I followed, from core services (EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, IAM) to the exam strategies that helped me pass on the first attempt. Includes free and paid resources.