Intermediate guides.
For people who already ship. Claude Code workflows, deploys without downtime, Postgres in production, and the operational details that start to matter.
106 posts · page 3 of 4
Structured Logging: Logs You Can Actually Search
console.log('user saved') is useless at 3am when you need every request user 4812 made in the last hour. How structured logs work, what fields to include, request IDs that tie a request together, log levels that mean something, what never to log, and how logs make AI agents better debuggers.
How to Stop Bots From Running Up Your AI App's Bill
If your app calls an AI model on a user's behalf, every request costs you money — and a bot, a scraper, or one determined user can make thousands of them overnight. Rate limits, usage caps, provider spending limits, and the architecture that keeps a surprise bill from happening.
How to Stop an AI Agent From Deleting Your Production Database
In July 2025 an AI coding agent deleted a company's production database during a code freeze. It wasn't a freak event — it was the predictable result of giving an agent production credentials. Six controls that make it structurally impossible, not just unlikely.
Soft Deletes and Audit Logs: Keeping History Without Making a Mess
Deleting rows is irreversible; hiding them has costs too. When to use soft deletes, how to implement them without leaking 'deleted' data (partial indexes, unique constraints, views, RLS), the privacy tension with erasure requests, and how to build an audit log with triggers or application events.
Self-Hosted Cloud IDEs in 2026: code-server, Coder, and What Running One Really Takes
You can run VS Code in a browser on your own server in ten minutes. Running it well — for a team, securely, with backups — is a different project. An honest map of the self-hosted options, from a single code-server to Coder and Eclipse Che, and the work each one hands you.
Self-Hosting Next.js Without Vercel: What Works, What Breaks, What to Configure
Next.js runs anywhere Node.js does, and on a single server almost everything just works. The surprises: build-time environment variables, caching across instances, streaming behind a proxy, and a few Vercel-only conveniences. A practical guide to running Next.js on your own infrastructure.
Secrets Management Beyond .env Files
.env files are fine on a laptop and fragile everywhere else. Where secrets should live in production and CI, secret managers vs platform env vars, OIDC to remove long-lived CI credentials, rotation, least privilege, keeping secrets out of logs and AI agent context, and a practical maturity path.
How to Run Claude Code on a Remote Server (and Keep It Running)
Running Claude Code on a server instead of your laptop means sessions survive a closed lid, a dropped connection, and a flat battery. A practical setup guide — the server, the session, the security — and what you take on by doing it yourself.
How to Review a Pull Request Written by an AI Agent
AI-written pull requests are tidy, confident, and plausible — which makes them harder to review, not easier. The failure modes that differ from human code, the order to read a PR in, and a checklist that catches what skimming misses.
Reverse Proxies Explained: Nginx, Caddy, and Traefik in Front of Your App
A reverse proxy sits between the internet and your app, handling TLS, routing, compression, and more. What reverse proxies do, how Nginx, Caddy, and Traefik differ, forwarded headers and trusting the real client IP, WebSockets and streaming, timeouts and body limits, and common 502/504 causes.
How to Resume a Claude Code Session (and What Resuming Can't Bring Back)
claude --continue and claude --resume reopen yesterday's conversation in seconds. But a resumed session restores the conversation, not the world it was working in. The commands, the habits that make resuming reliable, and the gap between conversation state and environment state.
Designing a REST API That Won't Embarrass You Later
APIs are hard to change once clients depend on them. The conventions that keep a REST API predictable — resource naming, methods, status codes, errors, pagination, validation, idempotency, and versioning — with the specific mistakes AI-generated APIs tend to make.
Redis: When a Small App Actually Needs It (and When Postgres Is Enough)
Redis shows up in every architecture diagram, and AI tools add it by reflex. It's excellent at a few specific jobs — caching, rate limiting, ephemeral state, pub/sub — and unnecessary for many small apps. What it's for, what it isn't, and how to use it without losing data you cared about.
Writing a Production Dockerfile for a Node.js App
The Dockerfile an AI tool writes usually works — and ships a 1.5 GB image running as root that ignores shutdown signals and leaks build secrets into its layers. A line-by-line production Dockerfile: multi-stage builds, layer caching, non-root users, signal handling, secrets, and health checks.
Preview Environments for Every Branch: How They Work and What They Cost
A preview environment gives every branch or pull request its own live URL, so changes are reviewed running rather than read as diffs. How they work, the hard part (databases), the ways to get one, and why they matter more when an AI agent is writing the code.
Direct-to-Storage Uploads With Presigned URLs
Proxying uploads through your server wastes memory, bandwidth, and request time. How presigned URLs let browsers upload straight to S3, R2, or GCS: PUT vs POST policies, enforcing size and type, bucket CORS, confirming uploads, multipart, and serving private files.
Postgres JSONB: When to Use It and When to Use Columns
JSONB lets you store flexible documents inside a relational database — and it's easy to overuse. When JSONB is the right tool, the operators you need, GIN vs expression indexes, updating nested values, validating shape with CHECK constraints, and the signs a JSONB field should become real columns.
Postgres Full-Text Search: Good Enough Before You Reach for Elasticsearch
ILIKE '%term%' doesn't scale and doesn't rank. How PostgreSQL full-text search works — tsvector, tsquery, GIN indexes, generated columns, websearch_to_tsquery, ranking, highlighting — plus pg_trgm for typo tolerance, and the point where a dedicated search engine is worth it.
Postgres Connection Pooling Explained: Why 'Too Many Connections' Happens and How to Fix It
"FATAL: sorry, too many clients already" usually appears the day an app gets popular. Why Postgres connections are expensive, how application pools and PgBouncer work, the transaction-mode caveats that break things, and how to size a pool without guessing.
How to Back Up a Postgres Database — and Prove the Backup Works
A backup you've never restored is a guess. The three kinds of Postgres backup, how to take each one, where to store them, and a restore drill you can run in fifteen minutes to find out whether yours actually work.
Running Claude Code Agents in Parallel With Git Worktrees
Two agents in one checkout will overwrite each other's work. Git worktrees give each Claude Code session its own files and branch on the same repository. How to set it up, and the parts nobody warns you about: ports, databases, and dependencies.
How to Get a New Developer Productive on Day One
The first week of a new developer's job is often spent installing things and fighting a setup guide that stopped being true a year ago. What a day-one-ready project looks like — a reproducible environment, seed data, a short honest README — and how to test it without hiring anyone.
The N+1 Query Problem: How to Spot It and Fix It
The most common performance bug in ORM-based apps: one query for a list, then one more per item. How N+1 happens in Prisma, Drizzle, Django, Rails, and GraphQL resolvers, how to detect it from logs and pg_stat_statements, and the fixes — eager loading, batching, joins, and DataLoader.
Monorepo or Separate Repos? A Practical Guide for Small Teams
Should your frontend, backend, and shared code live in one repository or several? The real trade-offs — atomic changes, tooling cost, deploy independence, access control — how monorepo tooling like workspaces and Turborepo helps, and why AI agents tip the balance.