Hi, I'm Ray.
I'm a backend engineer who spends most of the day thinking about latency, caching and how to keep distributed systems boring (in a good way). This is where I keep my notes — mostly for future me.
Recent posts
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Building a cache that doesn't lie to you
May 18, 2026
A few hard-won lessons on cache invalidation, TTL jitter and why stale-while-revalidate saved my weekend.
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Reading 1M rows without melting the database
Apr 02, 2026
Cursor-based pagination, batch sizing and the surprisingly large impact of connection pooling.
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A small guide to timeouts and retries
Feb 21, 2026
Retries are great until they aren't. Notes on exponential backoff, jitter and circuit breakers.