Fifteen years building and scaling distributed systems, across the industry's move from bare-metal servers and monoliths to cloud-native, Kubernetes and GitOps. I take on the work teams postpone: technical debt, CI/CD built from nothing, and keeping things up.
Database / Data — PostgreSQL, PgBouncer, Patroni, Prometheus, Linux
Reference architecture. Client code is under NDA, so this page describes the design and the reasoning behind it rather than a specific deployment.
Tuning PostgreSQL for highload without reaching for a bigger instance first. Streaming replication takes read traffic off the primary, partitioning keeps the hot set small, and a pooler stops thousands of application connections from becoming thousands of backend processes.
The largest improvements consistently came from reading execution plans rather than adding capacity: a missing composite index, a query that sorted before filtering, an ORM that fetched a hundred rows to count them. Hardware hides those for a quarter and then stops.