I'm Thuan, a software engineer based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

My work sits close to production: backend services, the databases and queues underneath them, and the infrastructure and delivery pipeline that puts them on a cluster and takes them off again. The parts worth writing about are usually the ones that only appear under load or during a deploy, because that is where a design gets tested rather than described.

A lot of that attention has gone to AI systems lately, which pose the same problem from a new direction: a model is easy to demo and hard to depend on. Getting one to produce output a program can trust, and knowing what its reasoning costs against what it buys, turns out to be ordinary engineering work.

What I write here

Posts tend to follow whatever I have been debugging:

• Software Engineering - service design and patterns that survive contact with a real system, like the transactional outbox and graceful shutdown.
• DevSecOps - Kubernetes, delivery pipelines, secrets and supply chain, such as keyless container image signing.
• Computer Science - the fundamentals that explain why a system behaves the way it does: LSM trees against B-trees, or how a Bloom filter saves a disk read.
• Artificial Intelligence - language models treated as components rather than magic: reliable structured output, and what reasoning tokens actually do.

Away from the keyboard

I ride, and I take photographs while riding. That is what the Photography posts are: a weekend on a bicycle to Vung Tau, two weeks on a motorbike through the Tay Bac highlands. Different subject, same habit of looking at how a thing is put together.

Get in touch

Questions and corrections are both welcome.

• Email: [email protected]
• WhatsApp: com.ndthuan
• Telegram: @ndthuan
• GitHub: ndthuan