RATN_LABS

Systems thinking, backend architecture, and AI engineering. Writing about Go, Elixir, distributed systems, AWS, and the craft of building reliable software.

012026System Design

That Little Square Does a Lot: How QR Codes Actually Work

From the black-and-white squares on your pizza box to the split-second bank transfer — here's how QR codes and UPI payments actually work under the hood, explained without the jargon.

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022026Golang

Go 1.26.2 Released: Security Fixes, Regression Patches, and an Upgrade Playbook

A beginner-friendly and technical deep dive into Go 1.26.2: what changed, why it matters, and how to upgrade safely in production.

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032026Tooling and DX

cursor-claude-personas: Give Your AI Coding Assistant a Domain Expert Brain in 30 Seconds

A free, open-source collection of 38 role-based AI persona packs for Claude Code, Cursor, and VS Code. Copy one folder into your project and your AI assistant instantly behaves like a seasoned specialist.

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042026Backend

Five Caching Strategies Every Backend Dev Should Know

A beginner-friendly guide to Cache-Aside, Read-Through, Write-Through, Write-Back, and Write-Around, with when to use each.

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052026Web Development

Chrome 144 Introduces the <geolocation> Element: Declarative Location Access for Modern Web Apps

Learn how Chrome 144's new HTML element simplifies location access, improves privacy, and replaces imperative navigator.geolocation calls with a declarative, user-driven approach.

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062026System Design

How Files Are Stored, Deleted, and Copied Inside Your Computer

Understand how files are actually stored on disk, why deletion is instant, and why copying takes time. A beginner-friendly deep dive into file systems and storage architecture.

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072026Computer Science

The Mechanics of Compression: How 100GB Becomes 25GB

A deep dive into the mathematical 'magic' behind data compression, from Huffman Coding to the architectural differences between ZIP and TAR.GZ.

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082025Web Development

Building This Blog: A Modern Next.js Blog with Markdown

How I built this blog using Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and markdown for content management. A complete guide to creating a fast, SEO-optimized blog.

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092025Golang

Optimizing Memory Layout in Go: A Deep Dive into Struct Design

How Go struct field ordering affects memory usage through alignment and padding, with concrete benchmarks showing the difference across millions of allocations and practical tools to detect wasted space.

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102024AWS

Deploy a Nanoc Static Site to S3 with GitHub Actions

A step-by-step guide to automating Nanoc website deployment to AWS S3 using GitHub Actions, including S3 bucket policy, IAM setup, and the complete workflow YAML.

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112024Software Architecture

Architectural Design for a Ride App such as OLA, UBER, RAPIDO

A microservices architecture breakdown for ride-sharing apps covering service boundaries, communication patterns (REST vs gRPC vs message queues), geo-location tracking, and the trade-offs between monolith-first and microservices approaches.

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122023AWS

Amazon SNS for Cost Reduction and Message Delivery Assurance in Startups

How Amazon SNS helps startups cut messaging costs with pay-per-message pricing, automatic retries, dead letter queues, and multi-region delivery — and when SQS or third-party services might be a better fit.

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132023AWS

S3 Policies Explained: Bucket Policies vs IAM Policies vs ACLs

How S3 access control actually works — the difference between bucket policies, IAM policies, and ACLs, with working JSON examples for common scenarios like public read access, encryption enforcement, and user-scoped permissions.

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