Author: Ankush Shandilya

Expert Opinion Sep 12, 2026

I migrated the most used screen of a product I ran for ten years, in nine batches, with no downtime and no maintenance window. Here is why I refused the single cutover, the abstraction I could only see halfway through, and the blind spot my own migration plan was structurally unable to catch.

Expert Opinion Sep 11, 2026

PHP is the language I reach for most, by choice. The PHP I write has almost nothing in common with the code that gave the language its reputation. Here is what modern PHP actually looks like, the three criticisms I think are fair, and the rule I use to decide when it is the wrong tool.

Expert Opinion Aug 28, 2026

Writing code got cheap. Checking whether it is right did not. I lost most of a day to a change that was correct, reviewed, and built on a premise that was wrong from the first sentence. Here is the line I draw now and why it is about the premise, not the difficulty.

Expert Opinion Aug 18, 2026

Moving business logic out of database triggers and into application events does not simplify the system. It trades atomicity for visibility, and it buys a new class of bug. I retired eleven triggers on a live product, left ten running on purpose, and got the sequencing wrong.

Expert Opinion Aug 04, 2026

I ran one product's codebase for ten years and decided not to migrate it to a framework. That call saved roughly a year of frozen feature work and cost me things I did not see at the time. Here is the architecture I built instead, the score I invented to track it, and the three decisions I would make differently.

DevOps Jul 21, 2026

One headless Chrome render costs about 250 MB for roughly one second. Measured on a 7.6 GB box with zero swap. Here is how to install it without pulling in snap or breaking a shared Node version, the flags that matter on a server, and why the queue design matters more than the memory number.

Expert Opinion Jul 14, 2026

Two error signatures sat on the same line of code. They looked like one problem. They were two, with opposite fixes. One needed me to stop throwing, the other needed me to catch and retry, and the fix that would have made the log quiet fastest was the worst option available.

Architecture Jul 10, 2026

Reliable email is never about sending the message. It is about the queue around it. Here is how I build PHP email systems that stop being the thing that silently breaks.

Command Line Jun 28, 2026

Production is broken and staging is full of unfinished work. You cannot merge staging to ship the fix. Here is the hotfix-branch workflow I use to release only the fix, in minutes.

Software Development Jun 22, 2026

A push failed with a 410 and an error that said "deprecated" right next to my git command. It was not git. It was Bitbucket retiring app passwords. Here is the tell, and the fix.