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Al Shakib E Elahi
08Articles

Things worth writing down once, so I stop re-deriving them.

Shorter than the case studies and less tied to one system. Mostly the failure modes that show up again regardless of the stack.

Published
3
In progress
4
  1. 18 May 2026

    Webhooks will lie to you

    Payment providers retry, reorder and duplicate their callbacks. Here is the handler shape that survives all three.

    Banking8 min
  2. 02 Mar 2026

    Persist, then emit

    The one ordering rule that separates real-time features that work from real-time features that work in the demo.

    Distributed Systems7 min
  3. 14 Jan 2026

    The deadline is the load test

    Contest platforms, ticket sales and tax portals share a traffic shape. Designing for the spike instead of the average.

    Architecture9 min
  4. 21 Jun 2026

    Worker services that nobody watches

    Background processing in banking systems, where the failure you never see is the expensive one.

    In progress
  5. 09 Jul 2026

    What the borrow checker teaches you about every other language

    Rust's constraints are a way of thinking about ownership that survives being ported to C# and TypeScript.

    In progress
  6. 27 Apr 2026

    Conventions are the product

    On Laravel, Spring Boot, and why fighting an opinionated framework costs more than adopting it.

    In progress
  7. 11 Feb 2026

    Reading ISO 20022 properly

    Structured financial messaging is not a schema migration. It is a change in what a payment instruction is allowed to mean.

    In progress