I use AI every day. Sometimes to fix a bug that’s been staring at me sideways for hours, other times to write a more civil message after yet another failed build. I’m not “against AI”. On the contrary, it’s already part of the daily workflow for almost all of us. The problem isn’t the tool. It’s the role we’re giving it. I’m not worried about AI becoming smarter than us. What worries me much more is us stopping to think before we even use it. ...
You can spend a whole afternoon making a request go from 600ms to 90ms. No new feature. No UI change. No one notices. At least, not in the way they notice a new button. But they do notice. They just don’t know what they’re noticing. They stop hesitating. They stop mistrusting the product. They stop waiting for the spinner to betray them. That feeling is backend. And I think that’s where the beauty is: in the parts that disappear. ...
There’s a kind of elegance that makes every engineer pause - a small idea that feels too clean to be true. For me, that idea was the magic link. One email, one click, no password. Frictionless authentication. No OAuth dependency. No password reset tickets. Just pure, minimal flow. And because I can’t resist a good experiment, I decided to build my own implementation from scratch - no frameworks, no auth libraries, just PHP, MySQL, and email delivery pipelines. ...
You wouldn’t expect a dot-four release to shift how you think. But PHP 8.4 did something subtle, it made domain models feel more honest. I didn’t notice it at first. The headlines were quiet: property hooks, asymmetric visibility, a few nice bugfixes. No splashy new syntax, no game-changing JIT leap. Just a couple of tools that looked like sugar for edge cases. Then I tried refactoring a class that had always annoyed me, a UserProfile, bloated with validations, protected properties, getters, and conditional setters. The usual dance: guard invariants, expose safely, override when needed but not always. You know the type. ...
You can spend a whole week rewriting a query, and nobody notices. At least, that’s how it feels at first. You cut the response time in half, eliminated three edge cases, and reduced load on the server by 40%. No one says “thank you.” There’s no visual change, no new button, no new feature. Just a system that works better, quietly, reliably. But here’s the trick: the user does notice. They don’t send you a Slack message about it, but they feel it. When a search bar responds instantly, when a form doesn’t freeze, when an article loads before they finish blinking, that’s backend design. Invisible, but deeply felt. ...