Engineering Stories

Deep-dives into real engineering problems I've encountered, how I investigated them, and the solutions I implemented. These are practical stories from production systems.

March 2026·7 min

Document Processing Timeouts and a Real-Time Progress API

Long-running document jobs sometimes hung; the UI had no way to show progress. We added timeout safeguards and a progress API so users could see status without polling blindly.

BackendAPIsDocument ProcessingTimeouts

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March 2026·6 min

Infinite Redirect Loop on User Onboarding

They were stuck. The app sent them to onboarding, then the onboarding page sent them right back.

ReactRoutingAuthDebugging

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March 2026·5 min

Redundant API Calls on Pagination

Changing the page size should trigger one request. So why were we seeing two?

ReactuseEffectData FetchingPerformance

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March 2026·8 min

Consolidating Report Calculation Logic with a Builder Pattern

Report generation was spread across controllers and helpers. We consolidated it into a single canonical service and simplified the main flow without rewriting the product.

RefactoringTypeScriptService LayerBuilder Pattern

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March 2026·5 min

Runtime Crash from Uninitialized State Arrays

Open the screen and the app crashed. Refresh and it worked. Sound familiar?

ReactState ManagementDebugging

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March 2026·6 min

Stale AI Memory Across Sessions

The bot sometimes seemed to remember a different conversation. Or a different user’s.

AILangChainState ManagementNode.js

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March 2026·6 min

Stale Data Flash on Tab Switch

Users switched tabs and saw the wrong list for a split second. The data was right eventually, so why did it feel like a bug?

ReactPerformanceState ManagementNext.js

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These stories are based on real engineering work. I write about problems that were genuinely challenging and required deep investigation. If you'd like to discuss any of these or work together, get in touch.