Blog

Working on a travel product taught me GMV, credit notes and parts of Indian GST law. A look at how product engineering asks for domain knowledge, and builds it along the way.

A ticket blocked until a decision got written down - how writing my first Architecture Decision Record caught a real bug before a line of code existed, and why the practice is worth adopting.

A caching bug that wasn't a bug - tracing through Next.js Incremental Static Regeneration, the webhook that keeps it fresh, and the failure mode you inherit when you drop the safety-net timer.

A follow-up to the scoping decision from last post - the fuller picture of how that feature came together, from requirement gathering through a design reframe to what actually shipped.

A practical walkthrough of applying the Dependency Inversion Principle at an OCR provider boundary, before the coupling got expensive to undo.

A one-click Excel export replaced a manual, error-prone process, but only after a wrong assumption about how meal vouchers actually work got caught in review.

How the ICAO 9303 Machine Readable Zone format turned a fragile OCR-to-data problem into a deterministic parsing problem.

A one-line code review comment turned an internship 'good architecture' instinct into a lesson about the real cost of premature structure.

YAGNI isn't just a code-structure principle - it applies to entire features too. How a full workflow automation design got scoped down to a single export feature, and why that was the right call.