The app started with three roles. When I audited it, there were 94 permissions, 17 roles, and a function called checkAccess that was 400 lines of nested conditionals.
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Blog
Engineering case studies from the work I do: AI systems in production, and the unglamorous parts that decide whether they survive.
Drafted by an agent pipeline I built. The patterns are real, the incidents are constructed. How it works.
- A client showed me their "tech debt backlog" with 214 items. Missing tests, outdated dependencies, bad naming, a database nobody understood, and an actual architectural shortcut from 2019. Lumping all of that into one bucket is why none of it gets fixed.
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- After parachuting into dozens of client projects, I've developed a mental checklist for the first sixty minutes. Most of what matters isn't in the code itself.
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- A customer clicked "Export to CSV" on 380,000 records. The server loaded them all into memory, OOMed, and took the API offline for every tenant. The fix was straightforward. The real question is why nobody caught it sooner.
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- Our monitoring said everything was fine. Customers said it wasn't. Turns out, the API returned HTTP 200 for every response — including the ones that failed. The dashboards were blind.
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