Articles

Jul 23, 2026 ·

How to Win Hackathons: Lessons from Seven Years

Winning hackathons starts with one useful idea: make it work, prove it clearly, and give judges a reason to remember it after a long day of demos and pitches.

Jun 03, 2026 ·

Serverless AI Alerting Architecture

The hard part of serverless AI alerting is not calling a model. The hard part is capturing the event, preserving state, notifying people in real time, and keeping the model stage replaceable.

Apr 04, 2026 ·

Why No AI First Is a Governance Strategy

"No AI first" is not an anti-AI position. It is a sequencing decision: make the records, permissions, lifecycle states, and search behavior trustworthy before asking AI to summarize or retrieve them.

Jan 23, 2026 ·

Agent-Ready Repos for Coding Agents

Agent-ready repositories do not depend on a model guessing your architecture. They make the important boundaries explicit enough that a coding agent can work inside the system instead of inventing a new one.

Dec 02, 2025 ·

Give Django GraphQL to an MCP Agent

A Django GraphQL API already describes what clients can ask for. MCP can turn that schema into an agent-facing tool surface, but the bridge still needs default-deny execution rules and protocol tests.

Oct 01, 2025 ·

Payments Layer Evolution: Wrapper to Adapter

Payment architecture usually improves when gateway behavior stops leaking through the application. The useful progression is not one gateway, then many gateways; it is wrapper, service boundary, adapter contract, and explicit webhook verification.

Feb 12, 2025 ·

Multi-Tenancy Three Ways

Multi-tenancy sounds like one architectural decision until the first request enters the system. In practice, tenant context often gets resolved at the backend, the frontend, and the edge of routing, each with a different trust model.

Dec 23, 2024 ·

Idempotent DLT Migration for Legacy Databases

Legacy migrations fail in the boring places: the network drops, a batch is restarted, or a mapping changes after half the destination has already been written. The useful question is not whether the first run works, but whether the second run leaves the target cleaner or more corrupted.

Jul 24, 2024 ·

Engineering One-Vote Guarantees in Django

A one-vote rule is only as strong as the last layer that can reject a duplicate write. In this Django voting system, that layer is the database constraint, while the surrounding audit and telemetry model creates a deliberate privacy tradeoff.

Sep 05, 2023 ·

GitOps-Style Wagtail Content Transport

Content drift is easy to dismiss until production has the approved copy, staging has yesterday's blocks, and a developer's database has the only working page structure. At that point, "just copy it in the CMS" becomes deployment work with no review trail.

Aug 15, 2023 ·

Modular GraphQL Schema Stitching in Django

GraphQL starts clean when the project is small. Then every app wants fields, mutations, auth rules, and client types, and the schema file becomes the place where boundaries go to disappear.