About me

This blog is not a collection of tutorials.

It is a record of technical decisions, system trade-offs, and lessons learned from real production systems — especially the ones that did not go as planned.

I write about backend engineering, system behavior at scale, observability, and the kinds of problems that only appear after software has been running in the real world for a while:
memory growth, reliability issues, unclear ownership boundaries, and operational blind spots.

The goal is simple:

To share how experienced engineers think when systems grow, break, and evolve — not just how they code.

If you are looking for step-by-step guides, this may not be the right place.
If you care about building systems that survive real usage and real constraints, you are in the right place.

I’m Luong Van Cuong, a software engineer focused on backend systems and long-term system reliability.

Over the years, I’ve worked on production systems built with Python, Django, and cloud-native infrastructure.
I’ve written code, deployed services, debugged incidents, and — more importantly — paid the cost of technical decisions made under pressure and uncertainty.

What interests me most today is not learning more frameworks, but understanding:

• why systems fail in non-obvious ways,
• how decisions at one layer affect behavior elsewhere,
• and how engineers can design software that remains understandable and operable over time.

This blog is where I document that thinking.

You’ll mostly find writing about:

• Engineering decisions & trade-offs
  Why one approach was chosen over another — and what it cost later.
• Production stories & postmortems
  Real incidents, real mistakes, and what they taught us.
• System thinking & architecture
  Boundaries, ownership, failure modes, and design under constraints.
• Observability & operations
  Metrics, monitoring, profiling, and why dashboards sometimes lie.
• Career & engineer mindset
  Becoming a senior engineer is more about judgment than syntax.

I don’t aim to be exhaustive or authoritative.
I aim to be honest, specific, and useful.