Backend

How Prisma's ILIKE silently broke Chinese text searches in PostgreSQL and the Unicode equivalence pitfalls that followed.

Most developers know indexes make queries faster. Fewer know why, or when adding one makes things worse.

Two concepts every backend engineer should understand deeply before their APIs go to production.

Production bugs are different from local ones. You can't just add a console.log and refresh. Here's how to approach them methodically.

SQL is easy to write badly. A few habits make queries more readable, more correct, and much easier to optimize later.

Authentication asks "who are you?" Authorization asks "what can you do?" Confusing them leads to security vulnerabilities that are easy to miss and hard to find.

Event-driven architecture decouples services by having them communicate through events rather than direct calls. Here's when it helps, when it doesn't, and how to think about it.

N+1 is one of the most common performance bugs in backend development. It's subtle, easy to introduce, and can turn a fast endpoint into a slow one as data grows.

Cache-Control, ETag, Last-Modified, these headers can make your app dramatically faster or subtly broken. Here's how to use them correctly.