← Engineering Logs

Series · 14 parts

The Engineering Logs

I’m Syed Ahmer Shah. Engineering Logs is where I document the real work behind building software—from architecture and debugging to performance, databases, and the decisions that shape a project. I write about what I build, the problems I run into, the choices I make, and what each project teaches me along the way. Part of Syed Ahmer Shah | Engineering Logs: Design, Sync, Energize.

Parts in this series

  1. The Edge Latency Lie: Solving Global Consistency

    Why edge computing fails at data writes. A deep dive into the CAP theorem, distributed consensus, and building resilient global architectures.

    9 minFirst on DEV

  2. Top 10 AI Tools Every Frontend Developer Should Know (2026 Guide)

    The 10 AI tools frontend developers are actually using in 2026 — with real pricing, honest tradeoffs, and how they fit into a production workflow.

    9 minFirst on DEV

  3. Change One Number. Take Everything.

    IDOR affects 94% of apps. Learn how changing one URL number exposes millions of records & how to build bulletproof defenses. | Syed Ahmer Shah

    9 minFirst on Hashnode

  4. How Databases Work: From Tables to Query Execution

    Learn how databases work from fundamentals to optimization. Explore SQL queries, indexing, transactions, & database design with real-world examples.

    9 minFirst on Medium

  5. The New Era of Software Engineering

    AI coding agents are changing software engineering. Here’s what this means for developer, student, coding skills & the future of software development.

    9 minFirst on Medium

  6. The Art of Object-Oriented Programming

    Learn object-oriented programming through classes, objects, encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, composition, and practical design principles.

    11 minFirst on Medium

  7. GleanGrid: Building a Pre-Order Marketplace for Farmers Markets

    How 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 min

  8. The Last Mango Problem: Race Conditions in a Real Marketplace

    What 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 min

  9. BookMyMovie: Building a Cinema Ticketing Platform

    How 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 min

  10. One Seat, Two Buyers: Race Conditions, IDOR and Keys in a Cinema Booking System

    How 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 min

  11. Zovita+: Building an Online Pharmacy That Adapts to Each Shopper

    How 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 min

  12. The Discount That Knew You Were Hesitating: Rule-Based Personalisation in an Online Pharmacy

    How 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 min

  13. RAG Retrieval Strategies on a 50k-Document Dataset: BM25 vs Dense vs Hybrid

    How 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 min

  14. Inside the Database Stack

    A senior-engineer walkthrough of the Django ORM and PostgreSQL: N+1 fixes, indexes, EXPLAIN plans, transactions, and when raw SQL is truly worth it.

    8 min