Blog
Articles on software engineering, system design, career guidance, and backend development.
2026
Model Context Protocol (MCP) Explained: How AI Agents Actually Connect to Your Systems
MCP went from an Anthropic open-source release in late 2024 to the industry standard for connecting LLMs to tools and data. Here is how the protocol actually works — hosts, clients, servers, tools, resources, prompts — why OpenAI and Google adopted it, and what to watch out for before exposing your systems to an agent.
Java 25 LTS: What's New, What Matters, and What to Actually Use
Java 25 is the long-term-support release after Java 21, and the one most backend teams will standardize on next. Scoped values go final, compact object headers shrink heap for free, Project Leyden attacks warmup time, and Java quietly becomes scriptable. Here is what matters for production systems — and what's still preview.
Long Context vs RAG in 2026: Why 'RAG Is Dead' Keeps Being Wrong
With million-token context windows in Gemini, Claude, and GPT-4.1, 'just stuff everything into the prompt' sounds simpler than building a RAG pipeline. Here's why retrieval survives — cost, freshness, access control, and the physics of attention — and how long context actually changed RAG design instead of killing it.
Kafka 4.0: ZooKeeper Is Finally Gone, and Queues Arrived
Apache Kafka 4.0 is the most consequential release in the project's history: ZooKeeper is fully removed in favor of KRaft, the new consumer rebalance protocol goes GA, and share groups (KIP-932) bring real queue semantics to Kafka. What changed, what breaks, and how to upgrade.
Precision vs Recall: The Essential Difference That Shapes RAG Systems
Understanding precision and recall is critical for building effective RAG systems. Learn how these metrics determine retrieval quality, the precision-recall trade-off, and why a RAG system with poor recall misses critical information while poor precision drowns the LLM in noise.
Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE): The Complete Guide to Tech's Fastest-Growing Role
Forward Deployed Engineer job postings grew over 800% in a single year. Here is what the role actually involves, how it differs from solutions architecture and sales engineering, who is hiring, what it pays, and how to prepare for it.
AI Coding Assistance and Agentic Development: Why Engineers Must Evolve Beyond Writing Code
Tools like Claude, Cursor, and Codex are reshaping how software is built. The engineer's real value is shifting from writing code to setting boundaries, questioning AI output, and holding the wider context no assistant can match.
New Software Engineering Job Roles: What Students Completing Engineering Should Focus On
The software engineering landscape has evolved far beyond traditional development roles. Here is what fresh engineering graduates should know about modern job roles and where to focus their learning.
The Backend Engineering Guide: Building, Operating, and Scaling Production Systems
A guide to becoming a senior backend engineer. Learn why backend systems are the engine of software, how to master observability, and the engineering layers required to build systems that don't break at 3 AM.