Prompt Engineering Mastery: 12 Advanced Techniques Top Developers Use in 2026
Prompt Engineering 2026 I still remember the first time I tried to get an AI model to do exactly what I wanted. It was frustrating, like trying to give directions…
One Missing Index Caused Our Database to Timeout Under Load
missing database index The error started appearing at 2:14 PM. Not gradually. Not as a warning. Just sudden, complete failure. SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 2006 MySQL server has gone away SQLSTATE[HY000]:…
Our Cron Jobs Were Quietly Failing for Months — Here’s Why
Laravel scheduler failures "Why haven't we sent any invoice reminders in three months?" The question came from our finance team during a casual Slack conversation. My stomach dropped. Invoice reminders…
A 10-Line Code Change That Eliminated Random Production Failures
Laravel Job Deadlocks It was 2:47 AM when my phone buzzed with the fourth Sentry alert of the night. Same error, mysterious stack trace. Same "I have no idea what's…
Monolith vs Microservices: What Actually Broke at 100K Users
monolith vs microservices "We need to move to microservices. The monolith can't scale." This was my tech lead's opening line in our architecture review meeting. We had just crossed 100,000…
We Cut Our AWS Bill by 42% Using Only Configuration Changes
AWS cost optimization I was in a meeting with our CFO when she slid a printed AWS bill across the table. "$47,000 for last month. That's up 18% from last…
How We Reduced Database Queries by 80% Without Touching the Schema
Database Queries Last month, our production dashboard was showing 15,000 database queries per minute during peak hours. Our response times were creeping up, and the database CPU was constantly hovering…
The Programming Landscape is Shifting: Here’s What I’m Seeing After 15 Years in the Trenches
emerging trends in computer programming I still remember the day I wrote my first "Hello World" program in C++. It was 2009, and I thought I had it all figured…
Building a CLI Tool from Scratch in Go
Go CLI tool So I've been using command line tools for years - git, docker, kubectl, you name it. But I never actually built one myself until last week when…
Building RESTful APIs with Go and Gorilla Mux
Last month, I had to rebuild our team's API from scratch. The old one? A mess of spaghetti code that nobody wanted to touch. I decided to go with Go…