The decisions that get six weeks of review are rarely the ones that bind an organization for years: measuring a choice by who it binds, for how long, and what undoing it costs, and matching review effort to that reach instead of to how big the decision looks.
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Hi, I'm Mustafa. Software engineer building reliable systems.
I design and ship distributed systems, data pipelines, and AI-augmented tooling. I write about the engineering tradeoffs behind them, what works, what breaks, and why.
Recent writing
All posts →The Blast Radius of a Technical Decision
The AI-Assisted Development Lifecycle
A spec-driven, review-heavy workflow for shipping real features with Cursor, built around one idea: build the feature twice.
Idempotency in Practice, Part 3: Idempotent Consumers and Pipelines
The idempotent consumer pattern implemented (processed-message table in the same transaction), dedup identity for events, Kafka's exactly-once machinery taken apart honestly, offset-commit ordering, and the series-capstone retrofit checklist.
Airflow on Kubernetes, Part 4: XCom on Object Storage, Secrets, and Slack Alerts
Moving XCom payloads to object storage instead of bloating the metadata DB, managing secrets and connections the isolated-worker way, and wiring up Slack notifications for failing DAGs.
Idempotency in Practice, Part 2: Building the Key Store
Brandur Leach's Stripe-style Postgres key store walked end to end in Kotlin: the schema, atomic claim via ON CONFLICT, recovery points so a crashed request resumes instead of double-executing, the Redis variant compared honestly, and the window you can't close.