Blog | Abdelwahab Mahmoud Case studies and notes from building production systems. https://abdelwahab.dev/atom.xml 2026-10-14T00:00:00.000Z Abdelwahab Mahmoud Pulling fulfillment out of the monolith https://abdelwahab.dev/blog/fulfillment-extraction/ 2026-10-14T00:00:00.000Z 2026-10-14T00:00:00.000Z Fulfillment came out of a PHP monolith one piece at a time, over SQS behind a REST contract, because a team of six could not freeze features. From empty repo to beta launch https://abdelwahab.dev/blog/zero-to-launch/ 2026-10-13T00:00:00.000Z 2026-10-13T00:00:00.000Z A marketplace from nothing to beta: React and Rails, calendar integrations, and CI pipelines from the first week, not as a cleanup later. One backend, drivers on the road https://abdelwahab.dev/blog/mobile-backend/ 2026-10-12T00:00:00.000Z 2026-10-12T00:00:00.000Z React Native apps fed by one Node.js backend. Live orders reach drivers on phones and the same state reaches the web, over Socket.IO. 7.33M rows per call https://abdelwahab.dev/blog/aurora/ 2026-10-05T00:00:00.000Z 2026-10-05T00:00:00.000Z One status broadcast ran 1,013 queries and pinned Aurora at 100% CPU. The fix was not an index. EXPLAIN showed each call scanning 7.33M rows. Draining, not stopping https://abdelwahab.dev/blog/fargate/ 2026-10-05T00:00:00.000Z 2026-10-05T00:00:00.000Z ECS scale-in was killing 2-hour translation jobs. So workers drain before they stop. One engine, three providers https://abdelwahab.dev/blog/engine/ 2026-10-05T00:00:00.000Z 2026-10-05T00:00:00.000Z Rate limits caused 65% of review failures. Treating them as "retry later" stopped provider outages from becoming ours. The verdict lives in code, not the prompt https://abdelwahab.dev/blog/triage/ 2026-10-05T00:00:00.000Z 2026-10-05T00:00:00.000Z Almost trusted a plausible explanation. So pass/fail had to live in tested code.