# Stack & Skill

> Developers sharing what they learned from real use cases: tutorials, guides, and deep dives on backend, frontend, JavaScript, React, Java, AI, and DevOps, written to help every engineer grow their craft.

Every article is reviewed by an editor before it's published. Add `.md` to any article URL for its Markdown source.

## Articles

- [Building a RAG Pipeline That Actually Works: Chunking, Embeddings, and Evaluation](https://www.stackandskill.com/blog/building-a-rag-pipeline.md): Build a RAG pipeline that holds up in production: chunking strategies, embeddings in pgvector, hybrid search with RRF, reranking, citations, and evaluation.
- [Microservices Communication: Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Patterns](https://www.stackandskill.com/blog/microservices-communication-patterns.md): When to call a service directly and when to send a message, plus timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, idempotent consumers, the outbox pattern, and sagas.
- [Core Web Vitals in Practice: Fixing LCP, INP, and CLS on Real Sites](https://www.stackandskill.com/blog/core-web-vitals-in-practice.md): 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.
- [Zero-Downtime Deployments with Docker and GitHub Actions](https://www.stackandskill.com/blog/zero-downtime-deployments-docker-github-actions.md): Ship zero-downtime deployments with Docker and GitHub Actions: graceful shutdown, readiness checks, blue-green with Compose and Caddy, and safe migrations.
- [REST API Design Best Practices: Building APIs Other Developers Love](https://www.stackandskill.com/blog/rest-api-design-best-practices.md): A practical guide to REST API design: resource URLs, status codes, RFC 9457 errors, keyset pagination, idempotency keys, ETags, versioning, and rate limits.
- [React Server Components Explained: When to Use Server vs. Client Components](https://www.stackandskill.com/blog/react-server-components-explained.md): 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.
- [JWT vs. Sessions: Choosing an Authentication Strategy for Your API](https://www.stackandskill.com/blog/jwt-vs-session-authentication.md): 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.
- [Java Virtual Threads in Practice: Scaling Blocking Code Without Going Reactive](https://www.stackandskill.com/blog/java-virtual-threads-in-practice.md): Learn how Java virtual threads scale blocking code: how they work, a runnable HttpClient fan-out, pinning, ThreadLocal pitfalls, and Spring Boot setup.
- [Caching Strategies with Redis: Cache-Aside, Write-Through, and When to Use Each](https://www.stackandskill.com/blog/redis-caching-strategies.md): A practical guide to Redis caching in TypeScript: cache-aside, TTL jitter, safe invalidation, write-through, write-behind, stampede fixes, and eviction.
- [The JavaScript Event Loop, Finally Explained: Tasks, Microtasks, and Rendering](https://www.stackandskill.com/blog/javascript-event-loop-explained.md): 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.
- [Database Indexing Explained: How B-Tree Indexes Really Speed Up Your Queries](https://www.stackandskill.com/blog/database-indexing-explained.md): How PostgreSQL B-tree indexes work, how to read EXPLAIN plans, and how to design composite, covering, partial, and expression indexes that actually get used.

## Optional

- [RSS feed](https://www.stackandskill.com/feed.xml): new articles
- [Learning paths](https://www.stackandskill.com/paths): ordered reading tracks
- [Write for us](https://www.stackandskill.com/write): how to contribute