Hello World: Why I Started Writing

Why a Blog?

After 6+ years of building backend systems, I've accumulated a lot of lessons — most of them learned the hard way, at 2am, with an on-call alert blaring. This blog is where I'll write them down.

The goal is simple: write the posts I wish I could have found when I was debugging a production incident or designing a new system from scratch.

What to Expect

I'll write about things I actually work with:

• Distributed systems — consistency, availability, and the lies CAP theorem tells you
• Node.js at scale — event loop gotchas, worker threads, clustering
• Kubernetes — real-world patterns, not just the happy path from the docs
• Databases — PostgreSQL internals, query planning, connection pooling
• Incident post-mortems — anonymized, but real

A Sample Code Block

Here's the kind of thing I'll be writing about. This is a simple Node.js pattern for graceful shutdown that I've used in production:

process.on('SIGTERM', async () => {
  console.log('SIGTERM received, starting graceful shutdown...')
 
  // Stop accepting new connections
  server.close(async () => {
    console.log('HTTP server closed')
 
    // Drain in-flight requests
    await drainQueue()
 
    // Close DB connections
    await db.destroy()
 
    console.log('Shutdown complete')
    process.exit(0)
  })
 
  // Force exit after 30 seconds
  setTimeout(() => {
    console.error('Forced shutdown after timeout')
    process.exit(1)
  }, 30_000)
})

The setTimeout at the end is the part people forget. Without it, a stuck request can prevent your pod from ever terminating cleanly.

Frequency

No promises on cadence. Quality over quantity. When I have something worth saying, I'll write it.

If something I write is wrong or you have a better approach, I'd genuinely want to know. Reach out on LinkedIn or by email.