Posts

While most AWS cost optimization guides focus on Reserved Instances and Spot Instances, there are several underutilized services that can provide significant savings. Here’s a detailed look at services that often get overlooked, with actual pricing comparisons. DynamoDB Provisioned vs On-Demand: 85% Cost Reduction DynamoDB on-demand is convenient but costs 6-7x more than provisioned capacity for predictable workloads. This difference can mean thousands of dollars per month for active applications. ...

Everyone’s adding AI to everything right now. GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT for code reviews, AI-powered testing tools – the pressure to adopt is intense. I get it. I’ve been through similar waves with microservices, NoSQL, and containerization. But here’s what I’ve learned: the shiny new tool often comes with costs that don’t show up in the demo. The Infrastructure Tax You Don’t See Coming Last month, I helped a startup debug their “AI-enhanced” development workflow. Their build times had tripled. Why? Every pull request triggered three different AI tools: code analysis, test generation, and documentation updates. ...

After building search functionality for multiple startups and watching countless developers struggle with Elasticsearch setup, I’ve learned that most tutorials either oversimplify or overcomplicate the process. Here’s the setup that actually works in 2025. Why Elasticsearch 9.1 Changes Everything In August 2024, Elasticsearch returned to open source under the AGPL license starting with version 8.16.0. Version 9.1.0 is now fully open source, which means you can finally use it without license concerns for most projects. ...

Last month, I spent 47 hours refactoring a single Node.js service. The codebase was 18 months old. The original developer was long gone. And every new feature request became a 3-day archaeological expedition. I’ve been tracking technical debt costs across projects for the past two years. Not gut feelings or estimates - actual time measurements. The numbers are worse than you think, but they’re also more predictable than most teams realize. ...

Your PostgreSQL queries were fast in development. Now in production on RDS, they crawl. Here’s how to find what’s really slowing them down and choose the right instance type. I’ve debugged hundreds of slow PostgreSQL queries on RDS. The problem is rarely what you think it is, and throwing a bigger instance at it usually doesn’t help. Let me show you how to find the real bottlenecks and pick the right instance for your workload. ...

Ever needed to automatically generate screenshots of web pages? Maybe for social media previews, monitoring, or just because manually screenshotting 50 URLs sounds like torture. I built this exact API for a client who needed to generate previews of user-submitted websites. Here’s how to build your own serverless screenshot service that can handle thousands of requests without breaking the bank. Why Lambda + Puppeteer? Before we dive in, let’s talk about why this architecture makes sense: ...

I’ve onboarded 200+ developers over the years. The ones who succeed fastest? They’re not necessarily the best coders - they’re the ones who can navigate bad documentation and still get productive. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t have to be this way. After watching countless talented developers struggle with terrible docs (and writing my fair share of bad ones), I’ve learned what actually works. Why Most Dev Docs Fail Let’s be honest - most documentation is written by the person who built the thing, for someone who already understands the thing. It’s the classic curse of knowledge, and it kills productivity. ...

Vector Search in Elasticsearch: Building Production-Ready AI-Powered Search That Actually Scales After our Elasticsearch bill hit $3,000/month for basic vector search, I learned these optimization tricks that cut costs by 85% while improving relevance. Three months ago, our team jumped on the AI bandwagon and replaced our traditional search with “semantic search powered by vectors.” The demo looked amazing. Production was a disaster. Our Elasticsearch cluster was constantly under memory pressure, queries took 2+ seconds, and our AWS bill exploded. ...

Welcome to Future Tech Stack We’re living through the most transformative period in software development history. AI code assistants like Claude, GitHub Copilot, and Cursor are reshaping how we write code. React Server Components are revolutionizing web architecture. WebAssembly is bringing near-native performance to browsers. Serverless computing is making infrastructure invisible. But here’s the question that keeps me up at night: What will the future tech stack actually look like? ...

Building Your Own AI Code Review Pipeline: How I Automated PR Reviews with Claude API and GitHub Actions After spending 2 hours daily reviewing PRs, I built an AI pipeline that catches 80% of issues before human review. Last week alone, it caught 12 security issues, 8 performance problems, and 23 accessibility violations before they hit production. Here’s exactly how to build your own for less than $10/month. The Breaking Point Three months ago, our team hit a wall. With 15-20 PRs daily and only 2 senior developers, code reviews became our biggest bottleneck. Junior developers waited 2-3 days for feedback. Critical bugs slipped through. I was spending more time reviewing code than writing it. ...