Writing
Architecture decisions, distributed systems, ad-tech engineering, and technical leadership.
Architecture
System design decisions, trade-off analysis, and architectural patterns from real production systems.
Designing Budget Pacing in CPM Ad Systems
Budget pacing sounds simple — spend X dollars by end of day. In practice, it's a distributed systems problem with race conditions, hot keys, and consistency trade-offs at every layer.
March 15, 2024
9 min
Event-Driven vs Request-Driven: A Trade-off Analysis
The choice between event-driven and request-driven architecture isn't about which is better — it's about which failure modes you're willing to accept.
January 22, 2024
7 min
Leadership
Technical leadership, team dynamics, RFC writing, and driving engineering culture at scale.
RFC Writing as a Staff Engineer
An RFC is not a design document. It's a tool for building consensus, surfacing blind spots, and creating a searchable record of why decisions were made.
February 10, 2024
6 min
How I Led a PHP to Go Migration
Migrating a production system while keeping the lights on is a leadership problem as much as a technical one. Here's what I learned.
November 5, 2023
8 min
Distributed Systems
Consistency, availability, failure modes, and the hard problems of building systems that span machines.
Distributed Locking: Redis vs etcd
Redis Redlock is fast and familiar. etcd is correct. The choice depends on whether you can tolerate the failure modes of each.
April 1, 2024
8 min
Backpressure Strategies in High-Traffic APIs
Without backpressure, a traffic spike doesn't just slow your system down — it takes it down. Here are the patterns that actually work.
September 18, 2023
7 min
Ad Tech
The engineering behind programmatic advertising — real-time bidding, budget pacing, and high-throughput serving.
Building an OpenRTB-Compliant Ad Exchange
OpenRTB is a 50-page spec that looks simple until you're debugging a bid response that's technically valid but semantically wrong. Here's what I learned building a compliant exchange.
May 10, 2024
10 min
Redis Hot-Key Mitigation at Scale
A single Redis key receiving 10,000 writes per second will become your bottleneck. Here are the patterns we used to distribute the load.
December 1, 2023
6 min