Rustan Ace Corpuz

How I Manage ADHD as a Software Engineer: The Power of Constant Note-Taking

Finding What Works As a software engineer with ADHD working in leadership and platform roles, I've spent years developing a note-taking system that helps me stay focused and productive. It's still a work in progress, but it gets better year by year. The core of my

Scaling a Data Pipeline: Lessons from Migrating Our Investment Data Infrastructure

The Starting Point When we first built our data pipeline for scraping investment intelligence from sources like Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and SimilarWeb, we optimized for simplicity. Our initial architecture served us well for the first few customers: Original Architecture: * SSH into a VM and manage multiple tmux sessions * Run bash scripts

How I learned to stop worrying and supervise the robot

After spending the last year integrating AI coding assistants into my workflow, I've come to a sobering realization: AI is absolutely a game-changer for software development, but it's not "there" yet. Not even close. And the journey to understanding its limitations cost me some

Finding the right tools for AI applications through painful trial and error

Building RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) applications in 2024 feels like navigating a minefield of framework choices. After months of experimentation and some production incidents I'd rather forget, we've finally landed on a stack that works. Here's our journey through the LLM framework landscape and why

Relearning to Be a Software Engineer in the LLM Era

I've been using Docker since 2016. Nine years of docker-compose up and docker build, shipping containers to production, debugging the occasional "works on my machine" issue. I was dangerous enough to get things working, but if you asked me about the nuances of layer caching or

Finding the Sweet Spot: Our Migration from Heroku to Dokploy

Last year, our Heroku bill hit $3,000/month. The breakdown was painful: $500/month for managed Postgres, $200 for Redis, and over $2,000 for dynos running our Django REST API and Celery workers. The compute costs were especially galling—we were paying premium prices for dynos that sat

Lessons learned from processing millions of Celery tasks without everything catching fire

When we started building Sugar Connect (our SugarCRM integration platform), we had a few hundred users syncing data between SugarCRM and their other business tools. Fast forward two years, and we're handling tens of thousands of active users, processing millions of tasks daily, and orchestrating complex sync workflows.