Notice Board
Thoughts, lessons, questions, and experiences pinned to the wall.
JavaScript – Coercion
A massive misconception among developers is that == checks for value equality while === checks for value and type equality. The accurate explanation is that == allows coercion in the equality comparison and === disallows coercion’
The crutches of your comfort zone
The crutches of your comfort zone may help you walk today, but they are the biggest enemy of your growth.
Serverless is not free — it’s a different kind of cost
Everyone sells serverless as ‘pay only for what you use’. But nobody talks about the cognitive overhead: cold starts, DLQ monitoring, distributed tracing across 10 Lambdas, and the fact that debugging is a completely different discipline. The cost moved from infra bills to engineering hours.
RxJS is still misunderstood after all these years
Most Angular developers I have mentored treat RxJS like a fancy callback. The shift to thinking in streams — composing, transforming, and timing data flows — takes months. But once it clicks, it changes how you design the entire state layer of an application.
interface vs. types in TS
The main concept interfaces offer over types is declaration merging. On the other side, types can do a lot more than interfaces (mapped types, conditional types, etc)
Monorepos are an organisational decision, not a technical one
You do not adopt Nx because it is cool. You adopt it when the pain of coordinating shared libraries across separate repos outweighs the simplicity of isolation. The tooling is good, but the real win is making team boundaries explicit through code structure.
Infrastructure-as-Code is a contract
When I write a CDK stack, I am not just provisioning resources. I am writing a contract: this is what the system looks like, reproducibly, forever. Drift from that contract is technical debt with real operational consequences. Treat it like application code — review it, test it, version it.
The best architecture decisions happen in boring meetings
Not in design docs or ADRs (though those matter). The real decisions happen in a 30-minute Slack call where someone says ‘should we really add another service for this?’ and the team actually stops to think. Slow down those conversations. They are cheaper than the refactor later.
Running 200 TPS on Lambda for an hour and learning humility
We load-tested our middleware at 200 transactions per second for a full hour. Lambda held. But the SQS queue depth graph looked like a heartbeat monitor, and I spent three hours convinced we had a bug. It was just auto-scaling warming up. Observability without context is noise.
Converting SOAP to JSON at the government’s pace
Legacy government systems speak SOAP. Modern microservices speak JSON. Building the translator layer in between — with WAF, private API Gateway, and Route 53 inbound resolvers — was the most unglamorous, most impactful work I have ever done. Nobody sees the middleware until it breaks.
What DLQs taught me about trust
The first time a dead-letter queue caught a batch of 3,000 failed messages in production, I felt sick. Then I realised: this is the system working. The DLQ is proof that we planned for failure. Reliability is not the absence of errors — it is knowing where they go.
Playwright + Python: bridging two worlds
Writing E2E tests for a TypeScript frontend using Python felt wrong at first. But the QA team owned Python, and the goal was automation, not purity. Two weeks in, we had 60% regression coverage on critical flows. Pragmatism beats elegance when deadlines are real.