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learning things, building things, breaking things, writing about it. technical projects, personal struggles, life stuff, random observations - just documenting whatever I'm working through.

#036 5 Aug 2026

Four Reasonable Decisions and a Dead Feed

Every page on this blog advertised an RSS feed that returned 404. No single line of code was wrong — four independently sensible decisions composed into a file that existed only inside a CI runner. Plus a cross-domain sitemap, a verification file an SPA can fake, and what Hugo, Astro and Eleventy do differently.

metablogrssseostatic-site-generatorbuild-systemsci

#035 1 Aug 2026

Documentation That Outlived Its Code

Every doc in this repo described a site that no longer existed — a terminal aesthetic replaced a year ago and a colour system reduced to an identity function. Auditing them turned up 60 lines of configuration that no code reads.

metadocumentationrefactoringportfolioblogtechnical-debt

#034 1 Aug 2026

[object Object]: How One Dependabot Bump Broke 34 of 39 Posts

A major bump to marked changed every renderer method to take a token object instead of positional strings. The build kept exiting 0 while emitting the literal text [object Object] into 34 of 39 posts — and a missing curl flag nearly convinced me nothing was wrong.

blogmarkedjavascriptdependabotdebuggingbuild-toolsnode

#033 1 Aug 2026

The Two-Month Outage: Dead DNS, Eager Filters, and Two Kinds of Postgres URL

scalable-chat-platform was down for two months and I did not notice. A free-tier Postgres powered off, its DNS record vanished, and a servlet filter took the whole app down with it — including the health endpoint that was supposed to tell me. Now with the Render-side postmortem: a 59-day hole in the deploy history, an empty healthCheckPath, and one of my own conclusions falsified.

scalable-chat-platformpostgresqlaivenrenderspring-bootincidentgithub-actionsdebuggingdeployment

#032 30 Jul 2026

HikariCP Exhaustion, Connection Hogging, and Optimistic Locking

Phase 2 of the spring-validation-lab: REQUIRES_NEW against a saturated pool, HTTP inside @Transactional after first SQL, and @Version under flash contention — all proven with H2 tests.

spring-bootjavahikaricptransactionsconcurrencyinterview-preptesting

#031 30 Jul 2026

Spring Bean Lifecycle, Circular Deps, and Mini-Umbrellas

Phase 1 wrap: @PostConstruct runs before the AOP proxy; constructor cycles fail to boot; Spring Data invents mini-transactions when you have no outer @Transactional.

spring-bootjavatransactionslifecycleinterview-preptesting

#030 30 Jul 2026

Spring ThreadLocals and @Async: What We Proved

Phase 1 continued: SecurityContext lives in a ThreadLocal by default. Naive @Async loses Authentication (not the context object). Explicit args and DelegatingSecurityContextRunnable fixes.

spring-bootjavasecurityasyncinterview-preptesting

#029 30 Jul 2026

Spring Proxies and Self-Invocation: What We Proved

Phase 1 of the spring-validation-lab: @Transactional is a sticky note read by a proxy. Self-invocation makes REQUIRES_NEW dead text. Broken and fixed designs, asserted with H2.

spring-bootjavatransactionsaopinterview-preptesting

#028 30 Jul 2026

Proving Spring Internals With Tests (Not Folklore)

Series hub: a Java 21 / Spring Boot 4.1 lab where broken and fixed Spring designs are proven with H2 tests. Deep dives for proxies, ThreadLocals, lifecycle, and HikariCP.

spring-bootjavatestingtransactionsinterview-preparchitecture

#027 27 May 2026

Hardening the Chat Platform: Deps, Deep Health, and CI Pings

Merged five Dependabot frontend PRs, fixed React 19 + Docker builds, opened actuator health for probes, and added caching and rate limits—then moved scheduled pings into the app repo so nothing doubles up.

scalable-chat-platformspring-bootreactgithub-actionshealthdeployment

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