Soo-Yeon Baek

Start with PostgreSQL and a modular monolith your team knows.

Choose your database and backend language before writing code, not after.

Name the three CTO types before signing to prevent six-month misalignment.

Senior technical leadership fills the gap before expensive decisions harden into costly mistakes.

A configuration flag read "on" for weeks while the system produced nothing underneath.

Deliberate naming prevents agents from swapping test and production credentials.

An API's success response doesn't always match what actually got saved.

A forgotten config setting silently combined with a correct command to create an impossible path.

The fix requires a read-only database role, not better instructions for the agent.

Monitoring for uptime misses the expensive loops that complete successfully but waste resources.

Headless browsers trigger bot detection that headed ones easily bypass.

Reasoning models can exhaust their token budget mid-thought and return empty responses.