Engineering blog

Notes from systems I have actually built — queues, rate limiters, media pipelines and retrieval.

Distributed Systems8 min

How I Built a Distributed Rate Limiter

Atomic Redis Lua rate limiting with three algorithms, per-API-key tiers, Prometheus metrics and real k6 numbers.

Distributed Systems9 min

Designing a Redis-Based Task Queue

At-least-once delivery with Lua acquisition, heartbeat leases, an independent Janitor and a Dead Letter Queue — stress-tested at 10K concurrent jobs.

Infrastructure8 min

Building a Video Transcoding Pipeline with FFmpeg and BullMQ

Presigned uploads, queue-isolated FFmpeg workers and HLS ladders — without putting video bytes or FFmpeg on the API path.

RAG7 min

Building Hybrid BM25 + Vector Search for RAG

Why vector-only retrieval fails on research papers, and how BM25, Reciprocal Rank Fusion and a CPU cross-encoder fix it.

AI Engineering8 min

Designing a Production RAG Pipeline

Ingestion, shared embeddings, query rewriting and cited streaming answers — the pieces that turn a RAG demo into a product feature.