Building MasonXPay (opens in new tab) — an open-source payment orchestration platform with multi-rail payments, virtual cards, and a double-entry ledger.
"A mason is a skilled craftsperson who builds structures that are meant to last."
Writing
- Two Tricks and a Shared Lie: How Modern Databases Actually Deliver ACID
For writes — especially the cases that demand strong consistency — the relational database is still where everything converges.
- Why I Keep Learning Languages (and How)
Yo hablo poco español, muy poco español (^-^) We're talking about a human language, not a programming language.
- Scaling a Payment Orchestration System from 100 to 10,000 TPS on AWS
In real life, hardly any chance to do this project; if it really comes, it's more than gold. This post is just a skeleton, such a project will be more complex
- Demystifying RDS Proxy: From I/O Multiplexing to Connection Management
Another type of 'gateway'.
- 100 TPS Is Not the Hard Part: What Payment Scale Actually Means
Hitting 100 TPS in load testing feels like a milestone. The real complexity in payment systems has nothing to do with throughput — it lives in reconciliation, provider behavior, and the silent ways money disappears.
- 8 Rounds Marathon, No Offer: What I Learned from My AWS Solutions Architect
8 rounds! the longest and most exhausting one.
- Why GDPR Is Also a Distributed Systems Problem: Lessons from Global Payment Networks
Data Residency, Cross-Border Transfers, Tokenization, Auditability, Data Retention, Privacy by Design, Compliance by Design, Regional Consistency, Global Replication. That is a very different kind of system design.
- Duolingo interview journey, no offer but still amazing
You know what, I travel to another country for stable internet to have this interview. One of the coolest thing I have done.
- IaC: From AWS Scripts to a Language Your Infrastructure Actually Speaks
Interesting, manage such massive infrastructure.
- RDMA, HPC, and Compute-Storage Separation: Why Everyone Is Talking About It
RDMA feels like one of those "datacenter-grade" technologies: powerful, widely used in high-performance environments, but difficult to validate or gain hands-on experience with unless you have access to specialized hardware.
- Stateful Services in K8s: From Local NVMe to RDMA-Powered Block Storage
Have a conversation with one of former colleague,currently work at Shopee. This post explores the evolution of storage strategies for K8s stateful services, moving from standard local disks to the cutting edge of RDMA-accelerated network storage.
- The Two-Pointer Pattern: How Distributed Systems Guarantee No Data Loss
Every serious distributed middleware — Kafka, RocketMQ, Redis, MySQL, etcd — solves the same fundamental problem. They just arrived at the solution from different directions.
- Algorithmic Patterns Landscape, Mindset, Approach
I don't like this, but someone may do. Mindset may cover 95%, but still need practice.
- The 'Invisible Giant': My Curious Journey with Alibaba RocketMQ
Alibaba RocketMQ, it's good, but almost invisible. Uncanny one, like the translation of robust.
- Zero-Downtime Migration: Sharding a 30M-Row MySQL Single Table
Most critical part is cutover traffic and rollback, single truth as always