The best systems are the ones you can explain in a few sentences. Complexity is easy —
anyone can add another service, another queue, another layer. Simplicity is hard.
It requires discipline, restraint, and the courage to say no.
I've spent years building distributed systems, and the pattern is always the same:
start simple, scale gradually, resist the urge to over-engineer. The systems that
survive are the ones that solve one problem exceptionally well, not ten problems poorly.
PostgreSQL. Redis. Python. These aren't exciting choices. They're not going to get you
on the front page of Hacker News. But they're reliable, well-documented, and proven at scale.
Every new technology comes with a cost: learning curve, debugging time, operational overhead.
Save your innovation tokens for problems that actually matter. Use boring technology for
everything else.
Monitoring tells you that something is wrong. Observability tells you why.
Dashboards full of metrics are useless if you can't answer: "What changed? Where? Why now?"
Build systems that explain themselves. Structured logging, distributed tracing,
correlation IDs. When production breaks at 3 AM, you'll thank yourself for the clarity.
Not how many algorithms you've memorized. Not whether you can reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard.
I care about how you think, how you communicate, and how you approach problems you haven't seen before.
Can you break down a complex system? Do you ask clarifying questions? Do you consider trade-offs?
These are the skills that matter when you're debugging a production outage, not LeetCode scores.
Every few months, someone proposes using Redis as the primary datastore.
Every time, I explain why that's a bad idea. Databases guarantee durability.
Caches optimize for speed. These are fundamentally different problems.
Use the right tool for the job. PostgreSQL for your source of truth.
Redis for temporary, high-speed access. Elasticsearch for search.
Don't try to make one tool do everything.
The goal of code review isn't to catch bugs (though that's nice).
It's to share knowledge, align on patterns, and build better engineers.
A good code review makes the team stronger.
Be specific, be kind, and explain the "why" behind your comments.
Point out what's done well, not just what needs fixing.
Code review is where culture gets built, one comment at a time.
I write occasionally about backend engineering, system design, and building reliable software.
No spam, no ads, just thoughtful writing when I have something worth saying.