Writing

A deep-dive from my March 2026 talk at AI Community Africa x MLOps Community Lagos, covering the five orchestration patterns, how each maps to latency, cost, security, and governance constraints, and why constrained environments often produce better-engineered systems.

Showing hundreds of moving things on a map in real time, answering "who's nearby?", and never losing an update, all at once, breaks if every ping hits your primary database. The fix is to split the fast path from the durable path.

The same mistakes show up in every codebase: a committed secret, a sloppy Dockerfile, a fragile shell script. Code review is too late and humans miss them. Here's the set of enforced, fail-closed gates I put on every project.

You don't need Kubernetes to deploy a handful of services without dropping traffic. Docker Swarm rolling updates behind a health-checked proxy get you there with a fraction of the operational weight.

Payment webhooks arrive twice, out of order, and sometimes forged, usually right when money is involved. Treat every one as untrusted and possibly-duplicate, or you'll double-credit someone.

On a marketplace, your catalog is only as good as the worst seller photo. Here's a computer-vision pipeline, segment then understand then regenerate, that turns messy uploads into consistent, catalog-ready images without a human touching each one.

Keyword search ranks the wrong candidates. Embeddings rank better, until they confidently match nonsense. Here's a job-matching pipeline that uses ML where it helps and rules where it must.

Aggregating live betting odds looks like "fetch and display." It's really real-time entity resolution over messy, adversarial sources, with money riding on getting it right. Here's the four-stage pipeline.

Holding fiat and crypto in one wallet, and settling between them, is an accounting problem before it's a blockchain problem. Here's how to keep the books correct.

On a busy mint, a transaction isn't fire-and-forget: it's a living thing you have to monitor, bump, and sometimes cancel. Here's how to model that honestly for users.