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How we evaluate a new SaaS vendor before signing — our internal checklist

After getting burned twice by tools that looked great in the demo but failed on data export and support SLAs, we built a 12-point vendor checklist covering security certifications, data portability, uptime history, and exit clauses. Sharing it here in case it helps others avoid the same mistakes.

What I learned building my first real Spring Boot project

Spent the last few weeks working hands-on with Spring Boot inside Software Development. Sharing a few practical lessons that would have saved me time if I'd known them on day one.

Nice to join the community!

Should junior developers be worried, or is this cycle similar to past disruptions like the shift to cloud or mobile?

Older engineers in my company keep comparing this AI moment to the cloud transition, saying it created more jobs than it destroyed. Is that comparison actually holding up so far, or is this genuinely different?

What a year of running our own hardware actually cost us

We moved our staging environment onto a refurbished server in the office to cut cloud spend. Twelve months on, here is the honest accounting. Saved: roughly ₹31,000 a month in cloud bills. Spent: ₹92,000 on the machine, ₹18,000 on a UPS after the second power cut corrupted a disk, two full weekends of setup, and about one evening a month on maintenance. It broke even around month five. Whether it was worth it depends on how you value the weekends. What genuinely surprised me: the reliability was fine. What did not surprise me: nobody else on the team wanted to learn how to look after it, so the bus factor is one — and that one is me. Would I do it again for staging? Yes. For production? Not without a second person who knows the setup.

Is anyone actually shipping AI features, or are we all still prototyping?

Every team I talk to has an LLM prototype. Very few have one in front of paying users. The gap seems to come down to unglamorous things: • What happens when the model returns nonsense at 2am and nobody notices? • How do you test something whose output changes between runs? • Who pays when a single user pastes a 40,000-token document? I am not asking whether it is useful — clearly it can be. I am asking what it took to get from demo to production, and what you cut to get there. If you have shipped something real, I would genuinely like to hear what broke first.

A backup you have never restored is not a backup

We had nightly database dumps running for two years. Green ticks in the dashboard, files in object storage, everything looked fine. Then we needed one. The dumps were being written with a flag that excluded large object data, and nobody had ever tried loading one into an empty database to check. What we do now, and I would recommend to anyone: • A scheduled job restores last night's dump into a throwaway database. • It counts rows per table and compares them against the source. • It runs one real query the application uses, and fails loudly if the result is wrong. It takes about four minutes a night. The first time we ran it, it failed — which is exactly the point. If you take one thing from this: the question is not "do we have backups". It is "when did we last restore one".

How are you handling secrets rotation without a paid vault?

Small team, Postgres + a Node API, everything on a single cloud provider. Right now our database password and third-party API keys live in environment variables and have not been rotated since we set them up. Managed vaults are the obvious answer but the pricing starts above what this project can justify. What I am considering: 1. The cloud provider's own secret manager — cheap, but ties us to them harder than I would like. 2. SOPS with age keys committed to the repo, decrypted at deploy. 3. Just rotating manually on a calendar reminder and accepting the risk. For those of you running small production systems: what actually works in practice, not in theory? I would rather hear "we do option 3 and it is fine" than a best-practice answer nobody follows.

We moved 12 microservices off Kubernetes and our bill dropped 60%

We ran a 3-node managed cluster for eighteen months because that is what everyone said to do. Looking at the actual numbers, eleven of our twelve services handled under 5 requests per second at peak. What we changed: • The two services that genuinely need to scale stayed on Kubernetes. • Everything else moved to a pair of load-balanced VMs behind a process manager. • Cron jobs became actual cron, not CronJob objects. Monthly infra went from around ₹58,000 to ₹23,000. Deploys got slower to set up but faster to reason about — no more debugging why a pod was Pending at 2am. The honest trade-off: we gave up automatic bin-packing and rolling deploys with no downtime. For a team of four, that was worth it. If you are twenty engineers with fifty services, ignore all of this. Curious whether anyone here has gone the other way and regretted it?

What's the best way to get started with ChatGPT in AI Tools & Platforms?

Trying to build a solid foundation in ChatGPT as part of AI Tools & Platforms. Any recommended resources, or a real project idea to practice with, that actually reflects how it's used in production?

How we used Perplexity to solve a real AI Tools & Platforms problem at work

Wanted to share a recent experience applying Perplexity on a live project under AI Tools & Platforms. Happy to go into more detail on what worked and what didn't if anyone's curious.

What I learned building my first real Experimentation project

Spent the last few weeks working hands-on with Experimentation inside Product Management. Sharing a few practical lessons that would have saved me time if I'd known them on day one.

Best free resources in 2026 for learning system design beyond the usual YouTube videos?

Exhausted the popular YouTube system design channels. Looking for more rigorous resources — papers, books, or courses that go deeper than the standard interview-prep content.

How we used MQTT to solve a real Internet of Things (IoT) problem at work

Wanted to share a recent experience applying MQTT on a live project under Internet of Things (IoT). Happy to go into more detail on what worked and what didn't if anyone's curious.

What's the best way to get started with Microservices in Software Development?

Trying to build a solid foundation in Microservices as part of Software Development. Any recommended resources, or a real project idea to practice with, that actually reflects how it's used in production?

How we used User Research to solve a real UI/UX Design problem at work

Wanted to share a recent experience applying User Research on a live project under UI/UX Design. Happy to go into more detail on what worked and what didn't if anyone's curious.

How we used Terraform to solve a real Cloud Computing problem at work

Wanted to share a recent experience applying Terraform on a live project under Cloud Computing. Happy to go into more detail on what worked and what didn't if anyone's curious.

Are system design rounds getting harder or easier now that candidates can reference AI during prep?

Prepping for senior-level interviews. With so much AI-assisted prep material available now, are interviewers compensating by asking harder or more nuanced questions?

What I learned building my first real Trend Analysis project

Spent the last few weeks working hands-on with Trend Analysis inside Emerging Technology. Sharing a few practical lessons that would have saved me time if I'd known them on day one.

How long should a small startup keep security logs before it becomes pointless overhead?

We're logging auth events, API access, and admin actions but retention is unbounded right now and storage costs are creeping up. What's a sensible default retention window for a 15-person startup without dedicated security staff?