● Syed Ahmer Shah · Blog
What I’m building, breaking, learning and exploring across software, AI and development. New articles are written here first; other platforms get a copy that points back.
FeaturedThe Engineering Logs
Follow one request from Django's QuerySet to PostgreSQL's disk pages, and learn what really slows your app down, why indexes can hurt, and when raw SQL earns its place.
Series · 14 parts
Architecture, debugging, databases and the calls behind each build: my series on what shipping real software actually teaches you.
Series · 6 parts
I put AI coding tools against real engineering problems to see where they help, where they break, and what still needs a human engineer.
Series · 5 parts
PHP vs Node, React vs HTMX, Java vs C#: languages and frameworks compared on speed, upkeep and where each one actually fits.
01How BM25, dense embeddings and hybrid search (RRF) behave on a 50k-document RAG corpus: working code, honest trade-offs, and when each one actually wins.
11 minThe Engineering Logs
02How Zovita+ turns browsing into personal discounts without a machine-learning model: one visitor key for guests and customers, interaction counters, six offer rules, one pricing function for the bag and the charge, offers locked and redeemed once at checkout, guest-to-account merging, A/B tests, and the edge cases that shaped it.
10 minThe Engineering Logs
03How I rebuilt Zovita+, an online pharmacy with 1,186 real medicines, a 3D symptom body map, personal offers, drug-interaction warnings, refill reminders, pharmacist-reviewed prescriptions, Urdu, and card or cash payments, on Laravel, React and MySQL: stack, data model, checkout locking, payments, admin, security, SEO, testing, what broke and what I'd change.
22 minThe Engineering Logs
04How BookMyMovie makes sure one cinema seat is never sold twice, a guessed booking number shows nothing, and a leaked or missing key can't quietly break tickets: row locks, lock order, a NULL-tolerant unique key, status compare-and-set, idempotency, IDOR scoping, HMAC tickets, captcha step-up, and the bugs that still got through.
11 minThe Engineering Logs
05How I built BookMyMovie on my own, a Laravel, React and MySQL cinema booking platform with live seat maps, trailers, QR e-tickets that work offline, online payments and an Urdu interface: stack, architecture, data model, design, SEO, security, what broke and what I would change.
17 minThe Engineering Logs
06What happens when fifty people try to buy the last item, use a single-use coupon or book a nearly full pickup window at the same instant, the MySQL snapshot detail that almost overbooked a stall, and the quieter races that hide in stock forms, restocks and payments.
10 minThe Engineering Logs
07How I designed and built GleanGrid on my own, a Laravel and React marketplace where Hyderabad's farmers publish weekly stock and customers reserve it, pay online or at the stall, and collect it: architecture, data model, payments, security and UX.
15 minThe Engineering Logs
08I rebuilt ahmershah.dev from scratch, moved my writing onto my own domain, and Google started showing a knowledge panel for my name. Here's what changed.
8 min
