Engineering the craft

Writing

Architecture, databases, deployment, and the production side of building web applications. Written in English & Chinese.

Clean Architecture in a Next.js Codebase

2025-09-02

How Nantian stays coherent as the feature list grows: presentation, domain, and data layers — and why the boundary between them is the actual deliverable.

#architecture#next.js#typescript

SQL vs NoSQL: Choosing a Database for a Booking System

2026-01-15

Why VietRailway uses Postgres with row-level locks for seat availability, where a document store would have been simpler, and the one query that settled the argument.

#database#postgresql#architecture

Why I Write Every Project in TypeScript

2025-05-11

The bugs TypeScript caught before my users did, what the migration actually cost, and why the "extra ceremony" pays for itself in week one.

#typescript#javascript#dx

Deploying a Student Project on AWS: What I Actually Learned

2025-03-28

EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, CloudFront — I deployed with all of them so you can skip half of them. The services that earned their keep and the ones that were a detour.

#aws#deployment#serverless

Message Queues 101: RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis

2025-02-20

When a queue actually helps, when it is overhead, and why Redis pub/sub covers most of what a solo project needs.

#backend#messaging#redis