How I went from parsing messy contracts to building an evidence-grounded AI platform on Google Cloud—and why evaluating the alternatives mattered more than choosing the fanciest technology. The Problem: Documents Are Everywhere. Structured Data Isn't. Every organization deals with documents: contracts, invoices, agreements, compliance reports, and
Most of us learned about money by guessing. We nod along to "expense ratio" and "Roth conversion", and hope a search result or a friend fills the gaps. Finnie is a different kind of help: an AI guide that explains how money, markets and taxes work,
Building an AI application is surprisingly easy. Building an AI application that is fast, persistent, safe, multi-user, inexpensive to run, and maintainable is a very different problem. That is the journey I went through while re-architecting Finnie, a personal-finance education application built around multiple AI agents. The
Over the last couple of weeks, our Designing Data-Intensive Applications book club has been discussing Chapter 7: Sharding. Unlike some of our previous sessions, these turned into less of a presentation and more of a brainstorming exercise. We would pick a design, ask "But what happens when...?"
If you’ve ever used an AI chatbot, you’ve probably marveled at its ability to string words together in a way that feels incredibly human. But behind the scenes, these AI models are constantly fighting a hidden battle: the tug-of-war between making perfect sense and actually being
If you spend enough time building backend systems, you'll eventually hit a wall where a single database server just isn't enough. Maybe your read traffic is spiking, or maybe you're losing sleep over what happens if that one server's motherboard fries at
Over the past two years, the AI community has made tremendous strides in agentic workflows. We’ve moved from simple prompt chains to complex, multi-agent frameworks capable of reasoning, planning, and executing tool calls. Yet, when engineering teams try to take these agentic proofs-of-concept into production, they
Recently, I attended an insightful Claude Code Workshop by Frontend Masters, led by Lydia from Anthropic's Claude Code team. The session provided a hands-on look at how Claude Code operates under the hood, offering a practical mental model for controlling its behavior and optimizing token usage. For
A Comprehensive Production-Grade Guide to the 7-Layer Retrieval-Augmented Generation Architecture 1. Why Grounding Matters & The Agentic Stack Large Language Models (LLMs) are incredibly capable, but they suffer from fundamental limitations when deployed within enterprise environments[cite: 1]. A model's outputs are strictly bound by
Democratizing access to high-quality financial literacy requires much more than wrapping an LLM prompt with a chat interface. Personal finance demands high precision, strict contextual guardrails, real-time data integration, and absolute system resilience. To bridge this gap, I developed Finnie — AI Finance Assistant, an open-source, production-grade
The rise of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) has popularized a style of development often called "vibe coding". In this ad-hoc approach, developers fluidly prompt an AI agent, accept diffs without a deep look, and copy-paste error messages until a prototype works. While vibe coding is
Apache Kafka combined with Avro serialization is the gold standard for high-throughput, structured data streaming. By stripping out repetitive schema definitions and relying on a centralized registry, engineering teams can save massive amounts of network bandwidth and storage. But what happens when that centralized registry suddenly vanishes during a
If you run high-traffic enterprise systems, zero-downtime deployments aren’t a luxury—they are a strict requirement. Engineering teams rely on rolling deployments to seamlessly shift traffic from Legacy (Version 1) to New (Version 2) without dropping a single user request. But what happens when Version 1 and
In the landscape of modern data engineering, developers often encounter a painful architectural crossroads. We begin our system designs using familiar, robust relational patterns. Our applications process high-concurrency checkouts, track real-time operational states, and handle user profile configurations seamlessly. This is the comfort zone of OLTP (Online Transaction
If you’ve been reading Martin Kleppmann’s Designing Data-Intensive Applications (specifically Chapter 4 on Storage and Retrieval), it’s easy to treat storage engines as flawless abstractions. We write a clean SQL query or throw a JSON document at an API, assuming the database will magically take care
Attention Is All You Need
Explore 'Attention Is All You Need,' the groundbreaking paper that introduced the Transformer model, revolutionizing deep learning and NLP.
Ragas
Discover how Ragas revolutionizes AI with automated evaluation for Retrieval Augmented Generation, enhancing content quality and relevance.
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