Three Cloud Access-Control Limits That Might Surprise You When Migrating Services at ScaleThe principle of least privilege is an access-control approach in which a user or service receives only the permissions needed to perform its job. For example, a service that reads files from a specifSep 1, 2026·5 min read·10
What Is a Backfill? Understanding a Common Data Evolution PatternThe first time I was asked to build a backfill for a production system, I remember thinking: This sounds important... and a little scary. It sounded like one of those engineering terms that everyoneAug 2, 2026·4 min read·78
Your Web Side Project Doesn't Need Enterprise InfrastructureLessons learned while building a side project on a budget.Jul 21, 2026·8 min read·26
Dead Letter Queues: The Safety Net That Only Works If Someone Checks It The problem it solves Any system that processes a stream of messages—orders, events, uploads, whatever—will eventually hit one it can’t handle. Maybe the message is malformed. Maybe a downstream depenJul 14, 2026·4 min read·19
Two Ways to Control Who Can Deploy to Production in GitHub ActionsTwo Ways to Control Who Can Deploy to Production in GitHub Actions Say you have a GitHub Actions workflow that someone can manually trigger to deploy something to an environment. It could be productioJul 11, 2026·3 min read·27
What Is a Webhook? And Why Do They Exist?You've probably heard the term webhook in engineering conversations and assumed it was something complicated. It isn't. A webhook is simply an HTTP endpoint on your server that another system calls toJul 7, 2026·3 min read·28
Building a Customer-Facing MCP Server: What Do You Actually Need?In the previous article, we looked at how MCP works behind the scenes and the role played by clients, servers, tools, resources, and prompts. This time, let's look at a specific use case: building a cJul 3, 2026·7 min read·82
