Founder & Editor-in-Chief
Backend engineer and founder of Stack & Scale. Writes deep dives on databases, caching, API design, and the systems behind the screen.
AI & MLTutorial
Build a RAG pipeline that holds up in production: chunking strategies, embeddings in pgvector, hybrid search with RRF, reranking, citations, and evaluation.
BackendGuide
When to call a service directly and when to send a message, plus timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, idempotent consumers, the outbox pattern, and sagas.
FrontendGuide
Fix Core Web Vitals on real sites: measure LCP, INP, and CLS from real users with the web-vitals library, then apply the fixes that move your 75th percentile.
DevOpsTutorial
Ship zero-downtime deployments with Docker and GitHub Actions: graceful shutdown, readiness checks, blue-green with Compose and Caddy, and safe migrations.
BackendGuide
A practical guide to REST API design: resource URLs, status codes, RFC 9457 errors, keyset pagination, idempotency keys, ETags, versioning, and rate limits.
ReactDeep dive
Learn how React Server Components work, what the use client directive really marks, and how to fetch, stream, and mutate data safely in the Next.js App Router.
BackendComparison
How server-side sessions and JWTs work, what stateless auth really costs, how to revoke and store tokens safely, and when I choose each one for an API.
JavaDeep dive
Learn how Java virtual threads scale blocking code: how they work, a runnable HttpClient fan-out, pinning, ThreadLocal pitfalls, and Spring Boot setup.
BackendGuide
A practical guide to Redis caching in TypeScript: cache-aside, TTL jitter, safe invalidation, write-through, write-behind, stampede fixes, and eviction.
JavaScriptDeep dive
Learn how the JavaScript event loop runs tasks, microtasks, and rendering in browsers and Node.js, with runnable ordering puzzles and fixes for a blocked loop.
I'm Yahia, a backend engineer and the founder of Stack & Scale. My work lives in the part of software most people never see: the queries, caches, queues, and API contracts that decide whether an application feels instant or falls over under real traffic.
The best engineering lessons I've learned didn't come from tutorials. They came from reading someone else's hard-won write-up at exactly the right moment: a postmortem, a benchmark, a clear explanation of why a system behaves the way it does.
I wanted a publication built entirely around that kind of writing. Every article here explains how something works, when to use it, and what goes wrong in production, with code you can actually run.
As editor, I work with every contributor from pitch to publish: shaping the outline, reviewing the code, and making sure each piece earns the reader's time. If you've solved a hard problem and want to teach it well, pitch me an article.
The best way to reach me is a comment on any article or a reply to the newsletter. I read everything.
Practical articles on backend, frontend, JavaScript, React, Java, AI, and DevOps, written by working engineers.