Topic Guides

Start with the problem, not the tag.

Every post in the Build Log carries tags, but a tag list isn't a way in for a stranger who lands on one story from a search. These are hand-picked guides: a real cluster of posts, grouped by what they actually have in common, with one post chosen to start on. Pick the wall you're actually hitting.

• Bot Defense and Scraper Mitigation

  Real swarms against a live SaaS, and the Cloudflare, WAF, and firewall craft that keeps it standing.

  21 posts

• Classic ASP Modernization

  Debugging and modernizing a profitable 20-year classic-ASP SaaS without a rewrite.

  57 posts

• SQL Server Correctness and Performance

  Execution plans, indexes, and the discipline that makes a live data repair safe to run.

  21 posts

• Payment Gateway Integration

  Two gateways, two flow shapes, and what fails silently in production when you treat them the same.

  8 posts

• Agent Tooling on Your Own Machine

  What actually breaks when you run Claude Code and a fleet of agents on real hardware.

  33 posts

• Verifying AI Output Before You Trust It

  A fix is not finished until someone watches it work. Status, dry runs, and AI-shaped answers all need the same check.

  40 posts

• Running Agents Against Production Safely

  Kill switches, read-before-write, and the capability gate that has to actually fire, not just look defined.

  20 posts

• Shared Context and the Handoffs That Actually Transfer

  A saved reply is not a stored record. What it takes for one session, or one agent, to hand off state that the next one can actually use.

  20 posts

• Deploy Verification: Green Does Not Mean Live

  A ticket said LIVE with a fix version stamped. The merge to master never ran. On release states that lie and how to catch it before a customer does.

  14 posts

• Debugging Method: Reading the System Instead of Guessing

  A timezone mismatch during a live incident, a log line that hid the real evidence, a framework quietly owning a DOM node. The craft of finding the real cause fast.

  21 posts

• Migrating Thousands of Domains Without Breaking a Live Customer

  The technical part of an edge migration took days. Moving a long tail of customer-managed DNS without breaking anyone's website took months.

  9 posts

• Running a SaaS Alone: Product Calls and the Tooling That Holds It Together

  Product and pricing decisions made without a team to argue with, and the backlog, dashboard, and audit habits that keep one person from losing the thread.

  42 posts