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....
The question sounds absurd at first glance—right up there with “Can my toaster run for Congress?” Yet here we are in 2026, watching AI systems become increasingly sophisticated contributors to our digital infrastructure. Some of them literally write code, review pull requests, and suggest architectural decisions. So maybe it’s time we ask: should these digital citizens get a say in how open-source projects govern themselves? The Paradox We’re Not Talking About Let me paint you a picture....