terminalENGINEERING LOGS // KNOWLEDGE BASE

Writing about Distributed Systems

Thoughts, deep-dives, and architectural blueprints on building scalable backends, cloud infrastructure, and secure APIs. No basic tutorials—just production-grade engineering.

Featured Blueprint

AI EngineeringOct 24, 2025

Building AI-Powered Document Extraction Pipelines

How we replaced filename-based classification with deterministic content-based analysis using Vertex AI, OCR fallback, and SQS event sourcing.

vertex-aiocrsqsevent-driven
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Security8 MIN READ

JWT Authentication Is Not Enough

Security practices every backend should implement: refresh token rotation, robust RBAC, session revocation, and audit logging.

Sep 12, 2025east
Cloud Architecture10 MIN READ

Designing Secure File Upload Systems on AWS

Implementing virus scanning, pre-signed URLs, strict bucket policies, and MIME validation to prevent malicious payloads in S3.

Aug 05, 2025east
Backend Architecture15 MIN READ

Building Event-Driven Systems with Lambda, SQS & EventBridge

Why synchronous APIs don't scale. A deep dive into decoupling services, dead-letter queues (DLQ), idempotency, and retry strategies.

Jul 18, 2025east
Security9 MIN READ

20 Backend Security Mistakes Developers Still Make

From trusting frontend validation to open S3 buckets and missing rate limiters—avoiding catastrophic vulnerabilities in production.

Jun 30, 2025east
Backend Architecture11 MIN READ

Designing APIs That Survive Production Traffic

Strict API contracts, pagination, rate limiting, and defensive validation to ensure your services don't buckle under load.

Jun 14, 2025east
AWS7 MIN READ

IAM Best Practices Every Developer Ignores

Enforcing least privilege, using STS for temporary credentials, and properly scoping resource policies to secure your cloud infrastructure.

May 22, 2025east
Backend Architecture10 MIN READ

How We Reduced Backend Response Time by 50%

Optimizing queries, implementing Redis connection pooling, cache invalidation strategies, and dropping latency to P99 ~12ms.

Apr 05, 2025east
System Design14 MIN READ

Designing Scalable Notification Systems

Architecting a real-time WebSocket notification service with Redis Pub/Sub, fan-out queues, and offline user recovery.

Mar 19, 2025east
Engineering Mindset8 MIN READ

Production Incidents That Changed How I Build Software

Hard-earned lessons on logging, distributed tracing, circuit breakers, and why you should always expect network failures.

Feb 10, 2025east