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Jacar categories — explore the topics A rocket whose eyes follow your cursor.
Software Development

Corporate Low-Code: Retool and Appsmith for Internal Tools

Retool and Appsmith cut internal tool development time from weeks to days. Retool leads the commercial SaaS market with polished components and enterprise permissions; Appsmith brings open source self-hosting at low or zero cost. Low-code works for dashboards, forms, and simple workflows, and breaks on complex logic or highly custom interfaces.

Architecture

GitOps With ArgoCD: From Hype to Stable Production

ArgoCD has established GitOps as the standard deployment practice for Kubernetes: the Git repository is the single source of truth for the desired state, and the agent continuously reconciles the cluster. This guide covers the four formal GitOps principles, sync policies, common production mistakes, and a comparison with Flux.

Architecture

Service Mesh in 2023: Istio, Linkerd, and the Cilium Option

A service mesh adds mTLS, uniform observability, and traffic management between microservices without modifying application code. The ecosystem has consolidated: Istio is the most complete and complex, Linkerd prioritises simplicity with Rust proxies, and Cilium delivers sidecarless service mesh via eBPF.

Architecture

containerd: The Runtime Underpinning Kubernetes

containerd is the runtime that runs containers in most modern Kubernetes clusters, and almost nobody notices. It manages the full container lifecycle: pulling the image, starting it, networking, and mounting the filesystem. It became the default runtime after Kubernetes 1.24 removed dockershim in May 2022.

Architecture

Event-Driven Architecture: When and How to Adopt It

Event-driven architecture decouples services through message brokers. Each component publishes events when something changes, instead of calling other services directly. It reduces coupling and improves resilience. It adds real value in domains with multiple consumers and natural asynchronous processing, but introduces operational complexity worth evaluating before adoption.

Software Development

WASI 0.2: The New Standard Interface for WebAssembly

WASI Preview 2 redefines how WebAssembly interacts with the operating system. It introduces the Component Model with typed WIT interfaces and granular capabilities, enabling modules written in different languages to compose without manual serialisation. The full standard arrives in 2024 with direct impact on edge functions, plugins, and serverless.

Architecture

Backstage: Spotify’s Developer Portal

Backstage is the open-source platform from Spotify for building Internal Developer Platforms: a web portal (Node.js + React) that centralises service catalogs, scaffolding, and technical documentation. Adopted by Netflix, American Airlines, and hundreds of companies since 2020, it needs 1-3 dedicated engineers and pays off for organisations with more than 50 developers.

Architecture

eBPF: Kernel Observability Without Recompiling

eBPF is a Linux kernel technology that lets you load and run verified, high-performance programs without recompiling the kernel or rebooting the system. It runs safely inside a virtual machine in the kernel and underpins tools such as Cilium, Pixie, Falco, and Tetragon for real-time tracing, networking, and security.

Architecture

Vector Databases: Qdrant, Pinecone, and Weaviate

Vector databases have gone from an experimental curiosity to the central component of most LLM-based products. This comparison covers Qdrant, Pinecone, and Weaviate: architecture, strengths, limitations, and a decision tree for choosing the right option based on your operational priorities and budget.

Architecture

PostgreSQL 16: Changes That Affect Day-to-Day Work

PostgreSQL 16, released in September 2023, adds logical replication from a standby, the pg_stat_io view for breaking down I/O by operation type and context, and parallel FULL OUTER JOIN support. Upgrading from 15 is straightforward; 13 loses support in November 2025, so plan the update soon.

Architecture

pgvector: Semantic Search Without Leaving Postgres

pgvector turns PostgreSQL into a fully functional vector database without adding a separate service to the stack. It extends Postgres with the vector type, IVFFlat indexes for approximate nearest-neighbour search (ANN), and the ability to combine relational SQL filters with vector ranking in a single query. For most RAG projects and internal chatbots, those limits never become a problem.

Artificial Intelligence

LangChain: The Framework for Orchestrating LLM Applications

LangChain is a Python framework that unifies building LLM applications: prompt templates, retrievers over vector databases, function-calling agents, and conversational memory. It earns its keep in fast prototypes and multi-model systems, but for a single well-defined production use case, direct code usually stays more maintainable.

Architecture

Chroma: A Lightweight Vector Database for Embedding Prototypes

Chroma is the easiest vector database to get started with embeddings and semantic search: install it with pip install chromadb, no extra infrastructure required, and it exposes a minimal API (add, query, delete). It suits prototypes and mid-sized RAG systems well; past a few million vectors, Qdrant or Milvus scale better.

Software Development

Rust in the Linux Kernel: First Steps and Controversies

Rust has been in the Linux kernel since version 6.1, though adoption is measured and deliberate. The Apple AGX GPU driver for Asahi Linux is the most prominent real upstream example. The goal is to eliminate an entire class of memory-safety bugs in new drivers without rewriting existing C code.

Software Development

Rust for Backend: axum and tokio in Real Services

Rust is no longer just a systems language: with tokio as the async runtime and axum as the HTTP framework, teams build high-performance backend services with compile-time type checking. It pays off in gateways, proxies and event processors; for typical CRUD over Postgres, Go or Node.js remain more productive.

Architecture

Micro-frontends in Practice: Benefits and Pitfalls

Micro-frontends bring the microservices idea to the UI: split the frontend into pieces that separate teams can develop and deploy independently. They pay off when coordination costs across four or more teams in the same SPA exceed the added technical overhead; without a mature design system and platform team, they tend to multiply problems.

Architecture

Platform Engineering: Internal Developer Platforms

Platform engineering formalizes the internal product development teams need. An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) centralises deployment, observability and self-service behind a unified interface so product teams deliver value without becoming infrastructure experts. Investment pays off from around 30 to 50 developers.

Architecture

Redis: Caching Strategies Every Backend Should Know

Redis alone isn't a caching strategy, just an ingredient: picking the right pattern among cache-aside, read-through, write-through, and write-behind, sizing TTL to how fast data actually changes, invalidating explicitly for critical data, and mitigating thundering herd with jitter and locking are the decisions that actually matter in production.

Architecture

Kubernetes 1.27: The Changes That Matter to Operators

Kubernetes 1.27 ("Chill Vibes"), released in April 2023, makes SeccompDefault stable so pods get safer syscall defaults automatically, moves KMS v2 to beta with rotatable encryption keys for etcd secrets, and stabilises scheduling gates. It also removes PodSecurityPolicy for good: without migrating to Pod Security Admission first, the upgrade is blocked entirely.

Architecture

Kafka in 2023: Event Streaming in the Enterprise

Apache Kafka has consolidated in 2023 as the enterprise event backbone thanks to KRaft, now GA and removing the ZooKeeper dependency. The most mature patterns are CDC with Debezium, event sourcing, and stream processing with Kafka Streams or Flink, while Redpanda and Pulsar compete as real alternatives depending on the case.

Architecture

OpenTelemetry: Unifying Logs, Metrics, and Traces

OpenTelemetry is the CNCF project, graduated in May 2026, that unifies logs, metrics, and traces under one SDK and the OTLP protocol, without locking you into a single backend. Traces have been stable since 2021 and metrics since 2023; logs are still maturing, but already worth adopting on new projects.

Software Development

WebAssembly: The Component Model as the Next Frontier

WebAssembly is moving beyond the browser through WASI, the standard system interface, and the component model, which defines declarative WIT interfaces so modules written in different languages can compose with each other. Cold start lands around 1 ms versus roughly 500 ms for a container, a key difference for serverless and edge computing teams.