$ git push --tag ship
Tutorials, service deep-dives and project ideas that come with working code, the failure modes, and the fixes. Every article ships with a repo.
Retries are guaranteed in distributed systems. Duplicate side effects are not. A deep dive into idempotency keys, the claim-first ledger pattern, and how to implement it in Django and PostgreSQL.
Synchronous, asynchronous, and poll-based invocation give the same Lambda code completely different failure modes, retry behavior, and scaling. A field guide to choosing, plus the three front doors for HTTPS: Function URLs, API Gateway, and ALB.
Both make your system asynchronous, but they solve different problems. Queue semantics vs topic semantics, when to reach for each, and the SNS → SQS fan-out pattern that shows up in real system designs.
Build the SNS-to-SQS fan-out pattern where each consumer owns a private queue with its own retry policy and DLQ. Covers queue policies, raw message delivery, redrive config, and the delivery guarantees you actually get.
A 25-minute walkthrough: create an AWS account, lock away the root user, create an IAM admin daily driver with MFA, and set billing budgets so you never get a surprise bill.
Why AWS won the cloud, what it looks like from a backend engineer's seat, and the one setup mistake almost every beginner makes on day one.