How we secured inter-service communication with HMAC-SHA256 signed tokens that expire in 10 seconds — no session state, no API keys to rotate, no middleware databases to query.
How replacing API response proxying with 307 redirects to signed CDN URLs eliminated origin bandwidth costs and removed an entire class of streaming bugs.
How to implement Stale-While-Revalidate caching that adapts based on user type and endpoint sensitivity. B2B users get fresh stock data while anonymous visitors enjoy faster cached responses.
How we squeezed 6x more cache entries into a 1GB Redis instance using gzip compression, while maintaining type safety and sub-millisecond overhead.
Three SQL anti-patterns that were killing our search performance, and the CTE optimizations that fixed them.