I've known vertical and horizontal scaling for a long time. Today I applied them to a real production setup on GCP, worked out requests per second and instance capacity, and the concepts turned into actual decisions.
A visual, interactive walk through the 2012 AlexNet paper — the idea, the eight layers, the tricks that made it train, the results, and what has held up since.
"It works on my infrastructure" is where the easy part ends and the actual job begins. A long, honest look at what a forward deployed engineer really does once the demo is over and you are standing inside someone else's environment.
It started at 2am with one runaway client. A hands-on walk through rate limiting — from a naive counter to a distributed token bucket that holds up across a fleet — with a live simulator you can go break yourself.
A simple, real-world explanation of why backend systems exist, focusing on browser sandboxing, security, compute limits, and trust boundaries.
A simple, real-world explanation of Singleton and Factory design patterns using practical JavaScript examples.
A simple Comparison of WebSockets, Server-Sent Events (SSE), and Polling, explained with relatable examples.