Saif's Blog

How I Replaced a Messy Regex Engine with Radix Trees (and Made Domain Matching 70% Faster)

We had a domain matching service returning responses in under a millisecond. So naturally, I deleted it. There is a golden rule in software engineering: if it ain't broke, don't touch it. This service wasn’t broken. It was fast. The servers weren’t actively on

Building a Poor Man's PKI using Terraform and cert-manager

When you're dealing with sensitive data, "secure enough" usually isn't enough. Enforcing TLS for all inter-service communication across our infrastructure has always been a strict requirement for us. Even though Azure uses wire encryption on their data plane, relying solely on cloud provider magic

Building a Poor Man's WAL on Azure Storage

So, picture this. You've built a slick web beacon service. It tracks user clicks, email opens, and page views at thousands of events per second. Every event gets pushed to an Azure Storage Queue, your downstream ETL cluster picks it up, processes it, and dumps it into your

A Practical Guide to Spring Boot Multi-Tenancy: My Notes

As a software engineer, I find myself solving the same complex problems multiple times. Multi-tenancy in Spring Boot is one of them. Every time I look up guides, even good ones, they seem... all over the place. Some parts are good, some are outdated, and none pull everything together into

Don't Chase Ghosts: Why Your Platform's Native Concurrency Is Your Best Bet

Hey everyone, So, you're a dev, trying to build cool, fast, and responsive stuff. It's inevitable: you eventually wander into the wild world of asynchronous programming. It's a land of promises, futures, and a whole lot of "wait, what's happening now?

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