Musings, mostly.
Some of them useful.
I'm Ipeluwa, a backend and systems engineer. Half of what follows is about Rust, Postgres internals, and the unglamorous machinery that keeps systems honest. The other half is about names, traffic, suya, and the futures we quietly rewrite. I stopped trying to keep the two apart.
Nobody tells you that growing up is mostly rewriting the future
We build futures in our heads without noticing, and then life edits them. On losing a future that had already started to feel like a memory.
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Almost 25, and apparently I should know what I am doing On the peculiar expectations of the mid-twenties, and the discovery that confidence and clarity are not the same thing. -
The people who make our ambition possible We tell stories about solitary ambition. Almost nobody builds anything alone, and the ones holding you up rarely appear in the telling. -
Why some endings do not need a villain Anger gives an ending a clean explanation. Incompatibility does not. On the harder kind of goodbye, the one with nobody to blame. -
Why markdown files over a CMS Fourth in the Why this over that series: this blog is a folder of text files in git, and that is a feature list, not an absence of one. - Why Go for the service, Rust for the tool Third in the Why this over that series: I write both daily. The split that emerged isn't about language quality, it's about what each artifact is for.
- Why SSE over WebSockets Second in the Why this over that series: most realtime features are one-way, and server-sent events give you reconnection, proxy-friendliness, and plain HTTP for free.
- Why SQLite over Postgres (sometimes) First in the Why this over that series: for single-user and single-box systems, the world's most deployed database in one copyable file is not the compromise. It's the correct choice.
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What I actually let coding agents do A working engineer's division of labour with AI coding agents: where they genuinely excel, where they quietly rot a codebase, and the practices that keep the difference visible. -
The correct way to eat suya Suya is not a meal, it is an event with meat in it. Eight rules, held with more conviction than any technical opinion I have. -
A flight recorder for Postgres Why database incidents stay unexplained, what aviation figured out about that decades ago, and the design thinking behind Tracegres: incidents should be reconstructable, not anecdotal. -
I gave my WhatsApp an AI brain Building Synq, a personal AI assistant that lives in my own WhatsApp: a Rust server, an unofficial bridge, semantic memory over every conversation, and replies that sound like me. -
Traffic is a personality test Nobody is themselves in a go-slow. Everybody is themselves in a go-slow. A field guide to the people you become when the road stops moving. -
Prepared statements vs connection pools Part three of speaking fluent PostgreSQL: why the query that works locally dies behind pgbouncer, explained from the wire up, and every fix ranked. -
Faking pg_catalog Part two of speaking fluent PostgreSQL: the system catalog is the real compatibility surface. What psql and every GUI tool actually ask, the five tables that carry the load, and how to build a catalog shim from captured traffic instead of guesswork. -
Speaking fluent PostgreSQL What implementing the Postgres wire protocol from three directions taught me: the startup dance, the two protocols hiding inside it, why transactions are the hard part, and the compatibility lies every Postgres-compatible database must tell. -
On having a name people can't say Six syllables, one inhale of hesitation, and a lifetime of small negotiations. What I have learned from watching people meet my name. -
Designing for the network you actually have Building consumer apps for African networks: latency budgets in round trips, the retry rule that prevents double charges, offline queues, payload discipline, and telling users the truth while the rail is slow. -
Never retry a timeout A timeout is not a failure, it is an unknown outcome. The double-charge lesson every payments engineer learns exactly once, formalised into rules you can apply today. -
The engineering behind Aevu How a calm, comment-free social app gets built: interest-first ranking, a media pipeline that is really a state machine, and moderation that fails closed. -
In praise of the aimless walk A walk with a destination is transport. A walk without one is something else entirely, and the first ten minutes are the toll you pay for it. -
In defence of boring technology The most productive stack is the one you stop thinking about. -
My notes app graveyard A tour of every system I built to remember things, and why I remember none of them. -
Hello, world. Again. Every blog starts with a post like this. Mine is no different, except it is shorter.