Stalin Pereira

Stalin Pereira

Writes about backend engineering, distributed systems, databases and AI. Street photographer when away from the keyboard.
19
Dec
Street photograph by Stalin Pereira

Does Gemini's 1M Context Window Kill RAG?

Is RAG still needed with massive context windows? (Cost/Latency arguments)
1 min read
18
Dec
Street photograph by Stalin Pereira

Detecting N+1 Queries in Production Logs

Visual guide to detecting ORM issues and fixing with eager loading
1 min read
18
Dec
Street photograph by Stalin Pereira

Designing Idempotency Keys for Payment APIs

A lost response plus an automatic retry equals a double charge. How to design idempotency keys properly: client rules, a Postgres schema, atomic key claims, concurrent retries, crash recovery around external calls, and the edge cases.
9 min read
17
Dec
Street photograph by Stalin Pereira

Decoupling Microservices: Moving from REST to Events

The trade-off between coupling (HTTP) and latency (Events)
1 min read
17
Dec
Street photograph by Stalin Pereira

Debugging Latency Spikes with Jaeger Traces

Visualizing a request bottleneck using Grafana Tempo/Jaeger
1 min read
16
Dec
Street photograph by Stalin Pereira

Configuring PgBouncer for Serverless High Concurrency

Serverless functions turn traffic spikes into connection storms that can take Postgres down. Here's how PgBouncer's transaction pooling absorbs them: a production-ready config, pool sizing, what transaction mode breaks, and when a managed pooler is the better fit.
8 min read
15
Dec
Street photograph by Stalin Pereira

Configuring ESLint Rules to Catch Bugs Before Runtime

Why ESLint/TypeScript catch more bugs than unit tests
1 min read
15
Dec
Street photograph by Stalin Pereira

Catching UI Bugs with Percy Visual Regression

Automating UI checks with Percy or Chromatic
1 min read
14
Dec
Street photograph by Stalin Pereira

Canary Releases: The Safe Way to Test in Production

Using Feature Flags to test safely with real users
1 min read
14
Dec
Street photograph by Stalin Pereira

Bun vs Node.js: Production Stability Benchmarks 2025

Real-world I/O benchmarks beyond Hello World; stability assessment
1 min read