Ghidra in 30 Minutes: Reading Assembly Without Hating It

Ghidra’s decompiler turns machine code into something that looks like C. But the output is full of strange variable names, weird casts, and functions that look nothing like what you’d write. Here’s how to read it anyway.

August 18, 2026 · 7 min · Hanh Pham

Debugging Microservices: Where Did That Request Go?

In a monolith, a stack trace tells you what went wrong. In microservices, you’re grepping across three services’ logs at 2 AM trying to figure out which one lost the request. Here’s how to make that possible instead of painful.

August 15, 2026 · 10 min · Hanh Pham

Versioning Microservices Without Breaking Everyone

In a monolith, renaming a field means updating all callers in one commit. In microservices, consumers upgrade on their own schedule, so your API has to evolve without breaking the ones that haven’t upgraded yet. Here’s how.

August 13, 2026 · 10 min · Hanh Pham

Running Microservices Locally Without Docker Compose Hell

You split the monolith into twelve services. Now a new developer’s first week is spent getting Docker Compose to run all twelve on their laptop, and half of them crash because of a port conflict. Here’s how to make local development work without the pain.

August 11, 2026 · 9 min · Hanh Pham

Deploying Microservices Without the Fear

In a monolith, deploy means pushing one thing. In microservices, every service deploys independently, which is the whole point, until you realize that ‘independently’ also means ‘without knowing what the other services are doing right now.’

August 8, 2026 · 9 min · Hanh Pham

Database Per Service: The Pattern That's Harder Than It Sounds

Each service owns its database. That’s the rule. But when a report needs data from four services, or a customer wants to see their complete order history, you’ve got a query problem that a single SELECT can’t solve. Here’s how to handle it.

August 6, 2026 · 10 min · Hanh Pham

Service Mesh: When You Actually Need One (and When You Don't)

A service mesh gives you mTLS, traffic management, and observability without changing application code. It also gives you another piece of infrastructure to operate, debug, and explain to new hires. Here’s how to tell whether the trade-off is worth it.

August 4, 2026 · 9 min · Hanh Pham

Go Performance Profiling with pprof: Finding the Slow Part

Your Go service is slow, but you don’t know where. Guessing is not a strategy. pprof tells you exactly where your program spends its time, memory, and CPU; here’s how to use it.

August 1, 2026 · 8 min · Hanh Pham

The Five Ways Microservices Talk to Each Other

Before picking REST, gRPC, or Kafka, you need to answer a more basic question: does this interaction block, and does the caller expect an answer? Get that wrong and no technology choice saves you.

July 30, 2026 · 9 min · Hanh Pham

What Actually Makes a Good Microservice Boundary

Before you draw a single service boundary, you need a vocabulary for why some splits age well and others turn into a distributed monolith. Coupling and cohesion are that vocabulary.

July 28, 2026 · 8 min · Hanh Pham