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Insights, guides, and product thinking

Long-form notes on engineering, architecture, and building reliable systems.

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System Design Fundamentals: The 10 Components Behind Every App That Scales

Anyone can write code that works. System design is what makes it work for 100 million users at once. This post walks through every core building block — databases, caching, load balancing, replication, partitioning, CAP theorem, message queues, and monitoring — with fact-checked numbers (WhatsApp moves 100+ billion messages a day, not millions) and a worked video-streaming design at the end.

Jun 10, 2026

Recent blog posts

The Ticking Clock: Why Short-Lived JWTs Are Your Best Defense

Stateless JWTs can't be revoked on demand — once issued, they live until they expire. This deep dive covers why short lifetimes (5–15 min) are the strongest control you have, how the access/refresh token split actually works, refresh token rotation with reuse detection, and the sender-constrained token guidance from RFC 9700 (Jan 2025).

SaurabhJun 8, 2026

Tokens Are Compute — Why Your LLM Bill Is Really a GPU Bill

Most engineers reason about LLMs in words, characters, or messages. The model sees none of that — it sees tokens, and tokens are compute someone's GPU has to run. This post traces what a token actually is, why output costs 3–10x more than input, the five-step journey of an API call, and the four cost levers most teams never pull.

SaurabhJun 5, 2026

Backend-for-Frontend (BFF): The Missing Piece in Your Fullstack App

Your frontend is doing too much — orchestrating microservices, parsing messy payloads, and worst of all, holding auth tokens the browser can't keep safe. The Backend-for-Frontend pattern moves all of that to a server layer you control. Here's why it matters (especially after the September 2025 npm attack that hit packages with 2.6B weekly downloads) and how Next.js gives you one for free.

SaurabhJun 3, 2026

5 WebSocket Design Decisions Most Developers Never Learn

Millions of developers ship chat apps, live dashboards, and multiplayer games on WebSockets without understanding the protocol's hidden design choices. This deep-dive unpacks five of them — the magic GUID handshake, TCP slow-start exploitation, client-side masking, firewall-friendly ports, and why HTTP/2 sometimes wins. You'll walk away able to explain the protocol at a level that holds up in any system design interview.

SaurabhJun 1, 2026

PageIndex: The Vectorless RAG That Reasons Through Documents Instead of Embedding Them

Traditional RAG chops documents into arbitrary chunks, embeds them, and hopes cosine similarity finds the right one. PageIndex throws that out — it builds a hierarchical table-of-contents tree and lets an LLM reason its way to the right section, the way a human expert flips to the right chapter. No embeddings, no vector DB. It hit 98.7% on the FinanceBench benchmark.

SaurabhMay 31, 2026

MCP 2.0: The Stateless Rewrite That Breaks Every Server You've Shipped

The next MCP spec drops session IDs, removes the initialize handshake, and turns Extensions, Tasks, and MCP Apps into first-class citizens. It's the largest revision since launch — and it contains breaking changes. Here's every change, why it exists, and what you have to migrate before July 28, 2026.

SaurabhMay 28, 2026

Time-Series Databases: How They Store Billions of Points in a Couple of Bytes Each

Traditional B-tree databases collapse under append-only telemetry. This is a deep dive into how TSDBs ingest millions of points per second — WAL, MemTables, LSM compaction, and the Gorilla compression that squeezes a 16-byte data point down to ~1.37 bytes. Covers cardinality, data modeling, and how to pick between Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, TimescaleDB, and InfluxDB.

SaurabhMay 27, 2026

Infrastructure as Code Solved Repeatability. It Didn't Solve Coordination.

Terraform fixed the snowflake-server problem. But once you have dozens of stacks, multiple teams, and dependencies between environments, a new class of failure shows up: drift, ordering, and compliance gaps. This is a deep dive into why provisioning isn't orchestration, and the control-plane pattern the best teams build on top of their IaC.

SaurabhMay 26, 2026

Your Site Looks Fine — Until It Loads on a Phone

Most slow sites aren't badly built — they just do too much work to load. This guide walks the critical rendering path step by step, then fixes the four things Lighthouse always flags: CSS, images, JavaScript, and fonts. Includes the delivery layer (CDN, HTTP/3, Brotli, caching) and how to stop performance from eroding after you fix it.

SaurabhMay 24, 2026

LinkedIn articles

Shorter essays and industry notes published on LinkedIn.

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Nvidia Just Made AI Agents Enterprise-Ready. Here's What Actually Happened.

Jensen Huang called OpenClaw 'the most important software release, probably ever' — comparing it to Linux, HTML, and Kubernetes in the same breath. Bold claim. But after digging into what Nvidia actually built around it, I think he might be right.

LinkedInMar 23, 2026

5 Brutal Truths Nobody Taught Me About Programming (But Should Have)

I've been writing code for years. Read the books. Studied the patterns. Nailed the algorithms. And yet — the lessons that actually made me a better developer? None of them came from a textbook. Every single one came from something breaking, a user doing something unexpected, or me staring at a screen at midnight wondering where it all went wrong.

LinkedInMar 17, 2026

The Software Factory Will Eat Your Job — Unless You Learn to Run It

A structural look at what the Nifty IT crash, StrongDM's AI experiment, and Big Tech's own numbers reveal about where engineering is actually headed.

LinkedInMar 16, 2026

OpenClaw: The 200K-Star AI Agent That Might Be GitHub's Most Dangerous Project

An open-source project is currently exploding on GitHub. In just a few months it crossed 200,000 stars and continues to grow daily. It promises something that no AI tool has managed to deliver before.

LinkedInMar 5, 2026

API Gateway vs Load Balancer vs Reverse Proxy: Finally Understanding the Difference

If you've ever nodded along in a meeting while someone threw around "API gateway," "load balancer," and "reverse proxy" like they were interchangeable — this one's for you.

LinkedInFeb 23, 2026

From 600 Commits a Day to Shipping Without Reading the Code

Peter Stainberger on AI-Native Software Development, Burnout, and the Future of Building. What if you could merge 600 commits in a single day—and none of them were written by hand?

LinkedInJan 29, 2026

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