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Learn before you build
What software really costs, how long it takes, how to pick a partner, and how to put AI tools to work — for startups, SMBs and enterprises.
How to Run a Paid Discovery Before You Commission a Build
A paid discovery that ends without signed acceptance criteria and a revised fixed-price proposal is not a discovery — it is a deposit. Here is the process a SaaS founder should run before committing £60–150k to a build.
Idempotent Webhooks: Handle Retries Without Duplicate Orders
A backend engineer's tutorial for building idempotent webhook handlers that survive Stripe or Razorpay retries. The fix is not deduplicating on event ID — it's collapsing the write and the ack into one atomic unit.
Deprovision a Departing Employee Without Breaking Production
Revoking a backend engineer's admin access is the easy part. The outages happen because their personal AWS key was quietly powering a production Lambda — and nobody audited before pulling the plug.
GST API Failure Cheatsheet: Handle Every Edge Case
A dense reference for backend engineers debugging GST API failures in production — error code mappings, retry contracts, and reconciliation strategies. Covers the semantic-failure trap where HTTP 200 hides a rejected filing.
RAG Is Not a Search Problem. It's a Retrieval Contract.
Most broken RAG prototypes fail in the retrieval layer, not the model. Here's how to think about RAG as a chain of contracts — and where the silent degradation actually happens.
Migrate a Live MySQL Schema Without Downtime
Most guides tell you to run gh-ost and walk away. They skip the part where the cutover step — not the copy — is what actually causes the 2 a.m. outage. Here's the playbook that survives production write load.
CRON Job Failure Cheatsheet: Diagnose, Alert, Recover
A dense reference for backend engineers whose scheduled jobs fail silently in production. Covers heartbeat monitoring, alert patterns, and recovery playbooks for missed runs.
Event Sourcing Is Not a Database Pattern
Most teams implement event sourcing as an event log next to their CRUD tables and end up with the complexity of both models and the benefits of neither. Here's the mental inversion that actually makes it work.
Enforce Row-Level Tenancy in Postgres Without a Middleware Tax
A hands-on tutorial for backend engineers who want tenant isolation enforced at the database layer, not in application WHERE clauses. Includes the set_config trick that avoids the RLS performance penalty most teams blame on the feature itself.
UPI Integration Cheatsheet for Backend Engineers
A dense reference for backend engineers integrating UPI: which flow to pick, how to handle the pending state without double-fulfilling orders, and which failure codes are actually terminal. Skip the Medium posts.
Cut Over to a New Payment Provider Without Losing Orders
A step-by-step payment cutover strategy for engineering teams running a live switch between two gateways. Covers webhook fencing, dual-write routing, and the 30-day tail where the old provider keeps firing events your new code was never written to handle.
Decommission a Legacy System Without Killing the Business
Most legacy system decommissioning projects don't fail at cutover — they fail months earlier, when someone treats data migration as an ETL job instead of a live reconciliation problem. Here's the sequenced playbook to retire the old system without taking the business down with it.
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