Articles
Worth reading
A short take on pieces worth your time — architecture, AI, system design, and engineering careers — each one linked back to its original source.
22 articles
Online migrations at scale
Stripe's playbook for the unglamorous but high-stakes work of migrating a live, heavily-used data model — hundreds of millions of Subscriptions objects, no downtime, no data loss allowed — without ever pausing the business to do it. The dual-write-then-backfill-then-cutover pattern they describe is the one I reach for on every schema migration of consequence, because it's the only approach I've seen actually survive production edge cases. Read this before your next "just add a migration" turns into an incident.
Microservices
The essay that put a name and a definition to an architectural style most of us were already half-doing by instinct — nine characteristics, from componentization via services to decentralized data management, laid out with none of the conference-talk hype the term later picked up. What holds up more than a decade later is the honesty about the cost side: microservices trade simplicity for operational complexity, and Fowler and Lewis say so plainly rather than selling it as a free upgrade. If you only ever read one primary source before an architecture debate about services vs. monolith, make it this one.
Introduction - OWASP Top 10:2025
The 2025 refresh of the industry's baseline security checklist, and the shift in framing is the interesting part: less a list of individual bugs to patch, more a set of root causes — insecure design, supply chain failures, mishandling of exceptional conditions — that produce those bugs in the first place. Worth reading as a gut-check on process, not just as a scanner ruleset, especially the expanded supply-chain category given how much of a modern stack you don't actually write yourself. The baseline every engineer building anything internet-facing should know cold.
Sequenced Collections in Java
A small but overdue fix to the Java collections API: a common SequencedCollection interface that finally gives every ordered collection — List, LinkedHashSet, LinkedHashMap — first/last element access and a reversed view, without the inconsistent workarounds we've all written over the years. Not a headline feature, but exactly the kind of quality-of-life change that quietly removes a class of bugs and boilerplate from day-to-day Java code. Worth five minutes if you touch Java collections regularly and haven't caught up on 21.
OpenJDK Project Loom
A solid, practical walkthrough of virtual threads — the biggest change to how Java handles concurrency since threads themselves, letting the JVM multiplex huge numbers of blocking I/O-bound tasks onto a handful of OS threads instead of paying the memory and context-switch tax for each one. If you're still writing reactive pipelines purely to dodge thread exhaustion, this is the article that explains why that tradeoff is largely gone as of modern Java LTS releases. Baeldung's usual strength: code you can actually run, not just theory.