Topic
Database and backend lessons from building marketplace software — the failure modes that don't show up until production data hits them.
2 guides, written from real builds.
Engineering
MCP is marketed as the way to give AI assistants access to your tools, so most people assume you need a model to use one. You don't. An MCP server is a JSON-RPC service with a discovery endpoint, and calling it directly is faster, deterministic and free. Here's when to skip the model entirely, when not to, and the whole client in about forty lines.
Engineering
Your aggregate query passes every local test, you deploy, and Postgres rejects it with "column must appear in the GROUP BY clause" — pointing at a column that is very obviously in the GROUP BY clause. This is a real difference between the two engines, and with an ORM there's a specific way to trigger it that looks completely correct. Here's the mechanism and the one-line fix.
Shahzeb Khan runs Databaaba, a one-person studio that builds engineering notes integrations for sellers, agencies, and software teams. Every guide here came out of a real client build.