Backend war stories, told properly.

‘Deleted 500’ Every Night for a Year: The Clean-Up That Never Left Page 1

• Imad ALILAT
• October 16, 2026
• Intermediate

Every night at 1 AM, for about a year, a scheduled job logged the same line: Deleted 500 export files from US Cloudinary tenant. Five times in a row, then it went back to sleep.

Over that same year, about 10,000 export files, 26 GB, piled up in the folder it was supposed to be emptying. Nobody complained, because nothing was slow.

Your Index Has Three Jobs. A Sort Can Break One of Them.

• Imad ALILAT
• August 25, 2026
• Intermediate

I showed a colleague a query reading 109 documents to return one, and the index it was supposed to be using. He looked at both and said the obvious thing: “that’s not even the same index. It’s got four fields, your query filters on three completely different ones.”

Two Billion Documents a Week to Produce a List of Numbers

• Imad ALILAT
• August 25, 2026
• Intermediate

One query. Seven days. Here’s what it cost.

JaVers From First Principles: How Automatic Audit Logging Actually Works

• Imad ALILAT
• August 24, 2026
• Beginner

Somebody asks who changed this invoice’s status last Tuesday, and from what. Your application has to be able to answer, and nobody wants to hand-write that logging on every setter.

Caffeine From First Principles: The Guarantee getIfPresent Doesn’t Make

• Imad ALILAT
• August 22, 2026
• Intermediate

Here’s a cache read. Three lines, no locks, nothing clever. It has a concurrency bug, and so does the identical code inside a library you may already depend on.

Your Feature Flag Bill Is a Cache Key Problem

• Imad ALILAT
• August 20, 2026
• Intermediate

A client exceeded their feature flag vendor’s monthly request quota by 100%.

The two fixes everyone proposed were delete the dead flags and stop calling flags inside loops. Both are sensible. Both save exactly zero requests.