Amazon OpenSearch Serverless (AOSS) presents the OpenSearch REST API. You point the standard client at it, sign your requests, and everything you already know appears to apply. That appearance is the whole problem. It is not a managed OpenSearch cluster, it is a different product that accepts a subset of
A notification system that only asks "should this be sent?" will eventually send everything, correctly, all at once and the person holding the phone will switch it off. This post is about the opposite failure, and it's the one users actually complain about: everything arrived, every
Every team that generates content with an LLM writes the same defensive code twice. First a prompt that ends in "respond with JSON in this exact shape." Then, a week later, the parser that copes with what actually comes back: a stray code fence, a preamble sentence, a
Our pet-health assistant streams its answers token by token. Under load, something odd showed up: response times for completely unrelated endpoints climbed in lockstep with how many people were mid-conversation. History reads, a settings fetch, a suggestion request. CPU sat close to idle. Nothing was throttled, nothing was retrying, no
The device is on the table. Its LED is breathing. Your phone's system Bluetooth settings can see it. Your app scans, and finds nothing. This is the single most common way a Bluetooth Low Energy integration fails, and it is almost never a bug in your code. It&
A pipeline written as a script is a promise that nothing will go wrong. Modeling it as a directed acyclic graph is what you do after something does. Every multi-step pipeline starts as a function. Fetch the data, clean it, score it, summarize it, store the result, notify someone. Six
When most people think about the engineering behind a pet wearable, they imagine motion sensors, batteries, AI models, or health analytics. Those are the visible innovations. What they rarely think about is the invisible layer that determines whether any of those innovations reach the user at all: Bluetooth connectivity. A
Deeplinks Are Distributed Systems in Disguise Why application navigation behaves more like distributed messaging than request routing. For years, I thought of deeplinks as a routing problem. A URL came in, it was parsed, and the application navigated to a screen. It felt deterministic—almost boring. That assumption lasted until
Every software product begins with a simple vision. The first few features are straightforward, the codebase is easy to understand, and engineering decisions are made with confidence because the system is still small. As products mature, however, the landscape changes. New capabilities are added, teams expand, delivery timelines become tighter,
Most production incidents don't start with faulty application code. They start with infrastructure changes nobody fully understood: a security policy edited through a cloud console, a manual config update made during an urgent fix, an environment that's slowly drifted away from the documentation meant to describe