Saif's Blog

Saif's Blog

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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

System Architecture

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 Some parts are good, some are outdated, and none pull everything together into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?

How I Taught My Services to Talk to Each Other (Without a Message Broker)

So, picture this. You've built a slick Go service. It takes some data from Azure Blob Storage, does some heavy lifting to compile it into a regexp object, and uses that for string matching. The compilation is the slow part, so you, being the clever developer you are,

Package Showcase: Simplifying Singleton Management in Laravel

Ever since the first "unofficial" RoadRunner+Laravel bridge came out back in 2019, I began writing Laravel applications with it to make the applications "long-running," which made the applications approximately 12 times faster than PHP-FPM. That's a pretty significant improvement, right? But we'

The Databag Series

A Little Bit of a Disaster, A Lot of Motivation: Building a CLI Secret Manager

So, let's talk about a little mishap that turned into a major motivation. My shiny new Macbook Pro M3, fresh out of the box, decided to brick itself after a routine software update, typical Apple. Cue dramatic music. And with it, went all my precious data, including those

Laravel's Contextual Attributes

Are you tired of constantly fetching the current user with request()->user(), auth()->user() or passing the Request object to every controller method that needs it? Laravel 11, with its continued support for PHP 8.1's attribute syntax, offers a more streamlined approach: by

Level Up Your Dev Workflow: Branch-Specific Data Volumes with Docker Compose

Imagine this: you're working on a new feature and you're deep into it, only to be suddenly interrupted by a critical bug in production. You want to switch to a new branch to work on the bug fix, but your local database is still a work-in-progress

Hello World!

So, I've finally taken the plunge! After years of lurking in the digital shadows, I've decided to step into the spotlight (or at least, the digital spotlight) and start my own little corner of the internet. This is it, folks. My very own blog. A place