If you’ve ever built a web application that needed to send emails, process images, or generate reports without hanging your users’ browsers, you’ve encountered the background job problem. And if you haven’t yet—congratulations, you’re still in the honeymoon phase of web development. The truth is, background job processing is one of those unsexy infrastructure problems that separates hobby projects from production systems. Get it right, and your users never notice. Get it wrong, and you’re at 3 AM debugging why all your scheduled reports vanished into the void after a deployment....
We love to talk about technical debt. It’s the monster under our bed, the thing we blame for slow sprints and frustrated developers. “We need to refactor,” we cry. “The codebase is a mess!” we protest in retrospectives. But here’s the uncomfortable truth that nobody at your last architecture meeting wanted to hear: sometimes the real culprit isn’t the quick fixes and shortcuts. Sometimes it’s the opposite—it’s the thing we built that’s too damn good for what it actually needed to do....
Why Your User Space Rate Limiter Is Probably Crying If you’ve ever tried to implement rate limiting in user space, you know the feeling. Packets arrive at the network interface, traverse through several kernel layers, bounce around in syscall overhead, and by the time your beautifully crafted rate limiting logic gets a chance to inspect them, you’ve already lost the performance battle. It’s like trying to stop a tsunami with a garden hose while wearing roller skates....
Remember when your car had a 5-speed transmission and a carburetor you could actually tinker with? Yeah, neither do I—but engineers loved them. Why? Because that “inefficient” design taught them how cars actually worked. Today’s software industry is obsessed with maximum efficiency, and I’m here to argue we’re optimizing away some of the most valuable parts of our craft. The Efficiency Cult We’ve Built Let’s be honest: the software development world is currently gripped by what I call “efficiency mania....
Performance testing is like stress-testing a relationship—you want to know how your system behaves when things get intense. And just like choosing the right partner, picking between Apache JMeter and Gatling can make all the difference. Let me walk you through this journey. Why Performance Testing Matters Before we dive into the tools, let’s be honest: nobody wakes up excited to test performance. But here’s the thing—your users will definitely wake up upset if your application crumbles under load....