TL;DR — A Kafka + Flink + OTel ingestion pipeline cost us ~$700–800/month at 10 MB/s. We rebuilt it as a single binary where the data, the write-ahead log, and the Iceberg catalog all live in S3 alone — no Kafka, no local disks, no coordination service — for ~$100/month. Here's the design.
If you have ever opened a system design article, seen a diagram with twelve boxes, three databases, a message queue, and the words "eventually consistent," and quietly closed the tab, this post is for you.
There is a myth that you need years of experience running large systems before you can learn system design. You don't. Plenty of engineers learn it before they have ever deployed anyt...
A few months ago, I set out to solve a problem I kept hearing about in tattoo communities: people struggle to visualize their tattoo ideas before committing to the chair.
The result is AI Tattoo Generator — a tool that takes a text description and generates a clean, artist-ready tattoo design in seconds.
AI is transforming the way we develop software. In the past, creating specific software required an entire team and months of work; AI has accelerated this process a hundredfold—the speed at which software with specific requirements can be developed today is simply immense.
You need to understand the entire process, from the initial sketch to the software's release. It isn't enough to s...
When working on personal, academic, or professional projects, we often start a repository as public to share progress, test configurations, or collaborate openly. However, at some point, it may become necessary to protect the code, especially if the project contains business logic, internal configurations, technical documentation, or an architecture that we do not want to expos...
Most "AI email agent" demos run one model against one mailbox: every message that lands gets the same prompt, the same context, the same handler. That's fine for a toy. It falls apart the moment your inbox is actually doing several different jobs — a billing question, a security report, and a sales lead all arriving at support@yourcompany.com within the same minute, each wanting a ...