Blog
Notes on engineering, technology trends, and career reflections.
- Project
Small Team, Big Surface: Operating 15 Services With 3 Engineers Without Burning Out
Tactics for running a broad platform with a small team — templates, paved roads, and the operational habits that keep on-call humane.
- Trend
The Architecture Tax: Why AI Won't Save You From Bad System Design
AI accelerates output and amplifies weak foundations. The most expensive line of code in 2026 is still the one built on the wrong abstraction.
- Technical
The Consular Dashboard Problem: RBAC/ABAC and Data Sovereignty Across Borders
Designing a consular operations dashboard for multiple countries: how RBAC plus ABAC, row-level policies, and data boundaries shape every decision.
- Feeling Check-in
One Year After the Layoff: Rebuilding as a Technical Lead
A year after the layoff: what rebuilding taught me about identity, systems, transparency, and choosing teams that document their decisions.
- Technical
Ship at the Edge: Turborepo + Next.js 16 + Cloudflare Pages — How I Run Forest City & ljieyao.com
Turborepo + Next.js 16 static exports at the edge: caching, ISR alternatives, and why Pages + Workers beats a VPS for portfolios.
- Trend
AI Agents Are Not Magic: What Building a Tender Parser with Groq & Ollama Taught Me
From hype to pipeline: shipping a document parser with hosted and local LLMs, learning where agents help, fail, and need humans in the loop.
- Project
Building a Unified Payment Gateway for 235k Users: 12 PSPs, 12 Regions, One Interface
How we unified a fragmented PSP landscape into one resilient gateway — patterns for idempotency, reconciliation, and graceful failover without naming vendors.
- Feeling Check-in
The Reality of Layoffs in Corporate Culture: A Personal Reflection
Layoffs are one of the harshest realities of corporate life. For employees, they often come without warning, without a chance for preparation, and, unfortunately, without empathy. My personal…
- Trend
Artificial Intelligence in Business Decision-Making: The Future of Corporate Strategy
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an indispensable tool in modern business, reshaping the way companies make decisions, optimize processes, and drive innovation. As an MBA student, I’m…
- Feeling Check-in
🚀 Professional Insight and Cautionary Advice for Fellow Programmers and Freelancers
In the realm of remote work and the burgeoning opportunities it presents, navigating the landscape with discernment has never been more critical. I’ve recently encountered a situation that, while…