TL;DR ❌ Don't fan out one Pub/Sub message per row when a single human click of a button can touch tens of thousands of rows on a shared Postgres cluster. ❌ Don't raise the "go do the work" event outside the DB transaction that
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. – Kurt Vonnegut Do you love Dependabot? Strange question, maybe. Let me narrow it: do you love Dependabot pull requests? You know the pile I mean: it's Monday morning, and twenty
Note: Internal service names used throughout this post are illustrative. The Problem We have a lot of internal services. As ZenBusiness's platform grew, so did the ecosystem of microservices powering it — each owning a defined slice of the business. That's the right architecture for us; but
Every Monday, someone on your team opens the error tracker, scrolls through the weekend’s noise, and asks the channel: “did anyone see this?” Someone else checks Jira for duplicates. By Tuesday, half the alerts are dismissed, a third spawned duplicate tickets, and the regression that actually matters is buried
For a while now, the Automations team at ZenBusiness has been seeing partner webhook events show up in their consumer way later than they should. We're talking 30 seconds to 2+ minutes from the time our publicly exposed webhook receiver accepted the webhook to the time the event
Remember the testing war room? You've been there. Everyone piles into a conference room — or a Zoom with 14 cameras — armed with a spreadsheet of test cases, a staging environment that may or may not be working, and a Jira board that's about to get very
From Relearning the same thing over and over to retaining it the first time At ZenBusiness, we are building an AI-powered product called Velo®. I am a full-stack engineer, not an AI or ML engineer, and working on Velo® requires me to actually understand what is happening under
I’m writing this blog without AI. I’m not sharing that to be contrarian or to toot my own horn as a writer. The act of writing out my thoughts and then getting them organized has always helped me to clear my head and grant myself focus. My thoughts
Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. – Tom Lehrer I built an AI code reviewer that my coworkers say is genuinely useful. It both surprised me and warmed my heart to hear the tool so lauded, since… I just
For the past year, I've been building visual prototypes as a product manager without a design background. What I've learned is that the tools have recently shifted in a way that fundamentally changes how we can approach this work—and it's a complete game
If you’ve ever built a chat interface, activity feed, or onboarding flow where content keeps growing over time, you’ve probably run into animation issues. Things start out fine with a handful of components, but as the UI grows, animations get noisy, scroll behavior becomes unpredictable, and performance starts
What is the router ? Every message into Velo™ goes through one agent: the router. The router's job is to examine the conversation and select exactly which downstream agent should respond. It could be checking order status, retrieving context from the knowledge base, concluding the conversation, or any other