# Databases

An index can turn a slow query into a fast one, or slow down every insert on the table. In this article, we explain database indexing in SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL: eleven index types, when to use each one, when to avoid them, and how to find missing and unused indexes.

This week: bool.dev explains how Raft commits writes and survives failures; Uber composes search indexes across independently owned services; Meta moves reusable privacy checks into data-access libraries; and LinkedIn connects user interactions to backend traces with OpenTelemetry.

This week: Anthropic redesigns code review around evidence and risk; LinkedIn combines generated data documentation with owner-maintained knowledge; Uber reduces translation-cache memory without introducing network calls; and Stripe discovers why more training data can make fraud detection worse.

Every migration guide explains how to split a monolith. This one goes the other way: a test for which services to merge, and seven patterns for merging them back into a modular monolith without a big-bang rewrite, each with its cost.

EF Core makes the slow path look exactly like the fast path. A scan, an N+1 loop, and a Cartesian join all read like clean LINQ. This guide walks through 18 concrete mistakes across querying, related data, change tracking, indexes, plan caching, and context overhead, with the fix for each and a ready-to-use rule for your AI coding assistant.

Weekend Reading #96 covers AI controls across the SDLC, Meta’s confidential processing architecture for AI glasses, automated dependency analysis across Uber’s service mesh, and Elastic’s benchmark-driven system for safely optimizing Elasticsearch with coding agents.

Weekend Reading: A weekly roundup of interesting Software Architecture and Programming articles from tech companies. Find fresh ideas and insights every weekend.

How X’s For You feed works, from candidate retrieval and Phoenix scoring to engagement weights, visibility rules, diversification, caching, and final feed assembly.

Weekly tech digest featuring a practical guide to 17 prioritization frameworks with formulas and examples, Netflix's brutally honest Service Topology production postmortem, Uber's SPIRE-backed AI agent identity framework with full actor chain propagation, and Uber's artifact storage modernization cutting 5PB/month egress by 99% with a custom validation proxy.

In this article, I will explain 10 anti-patterns in Architecture Decision Records and how to avoid them. Consider this article a guide to following Best Practices and creating a good Architecture Decision Record (ADR).

Prepare for your next .NET interview with 800+ interview questions and answers covering C#, ASP.NET Core, SQL, NoSQL, microservices, distributed systems, testing, AI, Agile, desktop and mobile development. For developers, senior engineers, architects and tech leads.

In this article, we review AI, LLM, prompting, .NET AI integration, Semantic Kernel, Microsoft Agent Framework, MCP, RAG, resilience, testing, observability, security, and AI coding tools for .NET engineers.

Learn how modern LLMs are trained, from pretraining and instruction tuning to SFT, RLHF, DPO, and model distillation. This guide explains how raw foundation models become production-ready AI assistants, coding copilots, and enterprise agents.

A practical guide to C# mobile development interviews in 2026. Covers .NET MAUI, Xamarin, architecture, performance, UI patterns, and real-world mobile engineering concepts with clear explanations and examples.

This week: a comprehensive .NET desktop development interview guide covering WinUI 3, MAUI, and Avalonia. Lyft goes beyond A/B testing, using surrogates and region splits to measure long-term marketplace effects. Airbnb shares how COVID broke their forecasting models and the Bayesian architecture they built to survive the next shock. And Meta reveals the ML behind Friend Bubbles, blending social closeness models with content signals to power social discovery on Facebook Reels.

This part of C# / .NET interview questions and answers covering modern desktop development: WinUI 3, .NET MAUI, Avalonia UI, MVVM architecture with CommunityToolkit, performance optimization, data storage with EF Core and SQLite, secure credentials, background sync, MSIX packaging, and auto-update strategies. 

This week: a comprehensive .NET testing guide covering everything from unit test fundamentals to gRPC contract testing. Netflix introduces MediaFM, their first tri-modal foundation model for deep content understanding. LinkedIn reveals how LLM embeddings and Generative Recommender models are powering the next generation of feed ranking for 1.3 billion users. And Pinterest walks through building a full MCP ecosystem — from registry and security to 66K monthly invocations, saving thousands of engineering hours.

This week: Uber shows how AI agents can automate design system documentation via MCP and how real-time batching solves hot-key payment bottlenecks at scale. Airbnb shares a transformer-based model for recommending travel destinations to exploratory users. And Pinterest details how unified context-intent embeddings power their Analytics Agent — now the most widely adopted internal agent at the company.

60+ C# / .NET testing interview questions with code examples. Covers unit testing, integration testing, gRPC, contracts, distributed systems, Playwright, and performance.

This week: Cloudflare’s MCP code mode, Uber’s database federation, Wix’s shift from prompting to AI management, and LinkedIn’s LLM-based ranking at scale.