Performance

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. ...

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. ...

React Server Components: The Deep Dive Nobody Told You About (With Production Patterns) Six months ago, I migrated a 200k LOC React application to Server Components. What started as a performance optimization turned into a complete architectural paradigm shift. Today, I’m sharing the patterns, gotchas, and mental models that took me months to figure out. This isn’t another “RSC basics” tutorial. This is about the real implementation details, the edge cases that bit me in production, and the patterns that actually scale. ...

WebAssembly in 2025: Why Every Frontend Developer Should Care (And How to Get Started) Three years ago, I dismissed WebAssembly as “something for game developers” and “too complex for regular web apps.” Last month, I used it to cut our image processing pipeline from 2.3 seconds to 180ms. My perspective has completely changed. WebAssembly isn’t just for games anymore. It’s becoming essential for modern web applications, and the tooling has finally reached a point where frontend developers can actually use it without a PhD in systems programming. ...

Why I Ditched Docker Desktop and You Should Too: A Complete Guide to Alternatives in 2025 After Docker Desktop crashed my M2 MacBook for the third time this week while eating 4GB of RAM to run a simple Node.js container, I finally had enough. That breaking point led me down a rabbit hole of Docker alternatives that honestly should have happened years ago. Here’s what I discovered after testing every major Docker Desktop alternative, complete with performance benchmarks, migration headaches, and brutally honest takes on what actually works. ...