Ismat Samadov
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© 2026 Ismat Samadov

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14 min read/0 views

The Staff Engineer Trap: Why the Best ICs Get Promoted Into Misery

She got promoted to Staff, spent 18 months in crisis, and left for a Senior role. The staff engineer trap is real — here's how to avoid it.

CareerSoftware EngineeringOpinionSalary
14 min read/0 views

Testing LLM Applications Is Nothing Like Testing Regular Software — Here's What Actually Works

200 unit tests passed. The chatbot still hallucinated a dentist's phone number. LLM testing needs evals, LLM-as-judge, and regression for non-determinism.

AIPythonSoftware EngineeringLLM
14 min read/0 views

Terraform Is Legacy Now — Pulumi, CDKTF, and the Infrastructure-as-Real-Code Movement

HashiCorp changed the license, IBM bought them, CDKTF got deprecated. Terraform is becoming the COBOL of infrastructure. Here's what's replacing it.

InfrastructureCloudDevOpsOpinion
14 min read/0 views

OpenTelemetry Is Eating Datadog's Lunch — The Open-Source Observability Stack in 2026

Our Datadog bill hit $47K/month. OpenTelemetry + LGTM stack replaced it for $1,200. The instrumentation war is over — OTel won.

MonitoringDevOpsOpen SourceInfrastructure
18 min read/0 views

Rate Limiting, Circuit Breakers, and Backpressure: The Three Patterns That Keep Distributed Systems Alive

A missing timeout killed our checkout on Black Friday. Rate limiting, circuit breakers, and backpressure are the three patterns that prevent cascading failures.

ArchitectureBackendPerformancePython
15 min read/0 views

Change Data Capture Replaced Our Entire ETL Pipeline — Debezium, Postgres, and the Death of Batch

Our 15-minute batch ETL caused a billing incident. Debezium reading the Postgres WAL replaced the entire pipeline. CDC setup, consumer patterns, and production gotchas.

Data EngineeringPostgreSQLBackendArchitecture
13 min read/0 views

ClickHouse Processes 1 Billion Rows Per Second on a Single Node — OLAP for Engineers Who Hate Complexity

A 47-second Postgres query took 120ms on ClickHouse. Columnar storage, vectorized execution, and why your analytics belong in OLAP.

DatabaseData EngineeringPerformanceAnalytics
13 min read/0 views

SQLite Is the Most Deployed Database on Earth and You're Ignoring It

One trillion SQLite databases exist right now. Turso, Litestream, and D1 fixed every limitation. Stop defaulting to Postgres.

DatabaseSQLBackendOpinion
13 min read/0 views

vLLM vs TGI vs Ollama: Self-Hosting LLMs Without Burning Money or Losing Sleep

Ollama peaks at 41 tok/s. vLLM hits 793. TGI is in maintenance mode. Here's the self-hosting guide I wish existed before I started.

AILLMInfrastructurePython
13 min read/0 views

Structured Output Changed How I Build LLM Apps — Pydantic, Tool Use, and the End of Regex Parsing

I spent 6 months parsing LLM output with regex. Then Pydantic + structured outputs eliminated every 3 AM parsing alert. Here's the migration.

AILLMPythonBackend
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