What I learned about AI-assisted development fom building a production service in 83 days

After 14 years of writing code professionally, I thought I had a pretty good handle on what “moving fast” meant in software development. I’ve shipped features under impossible deadlines, refactored legacy systems while they were running in production, and led teams through the chaos of hypergrowth. I thought I’d seen it all.

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Why getting an LLM to produce readable text requires way more than clever prompts

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Here’s a dirty secret about working with large language models: the hard part isn’t crafting the perfect prompt. It’s building the infrastructure around the model to make it behave consistently. I spend my nights wrestling with JSON schemas and muttering about data pipelines, not dreaming up magic incantations.

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Generative AI in software engineering is not about replacing engineers, it’s about redefining where human judgment and accountability must remain.

The tech industry is buzzing with excitement about generative AI. Bold claims are flying everywhere from executives boasting that 30% of their code is AI-written to predictions that AI models will soon “join the workforce” as full-fledged engineers.

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A practical guide to building a modular monolith without losing the ability to scale back in a Spring Cloud powered stack

Here’s an irony for you: everyone talks about migrating from monolith to microservices. The entire industry narrative flows in one direction. In fact, when I was searching for images for this post, every single diagram showed monolith → microservices. Not a single arrow pointed the other way.

But sometimes the right move is consolidation. Building a modular monolith is a reality people are often hesitant to discuss publicly, thanks to years of microservices hype.

When we were running 15 microservices, it sounded like good architecture on paper. In practice, it was burning through our budget and adding complexity we didn’t need.

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A practical guide from 14 years of building systems that grow

Introduction: Why This Guide Matters

There are a lot of courses lectured in universities, but only a few of them try to teach real-world problems like designing scalable software architecture, secure coding, and other practical challenges that engineers face daily. I always wanted to write something about these kinds of problems I’ve faced throughout my career, and I think the time has come to put pen to paper. I hope this proves beneficial for anyone looking for practical, experience-based knowledge.

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