Field notes on systems I've built, decisions I'd make again, and the messy parts in between.
What worked, what didn't, and the productivity gains we actually measured after rolling out Claude across the team.
A pragmatic walkthrough of the layer audit, multi-stage builds, and base-image swap that cut our NestJS images from ~1.2GB to ~120MB.
A serverless playbook for event-driven workflows that scale to thousands of users without the operational tax of running Kafka.