Architecture, scaling, and the boring discipline that separates systems that ship from systems that don't.
The boring discipline that gets you from a hundred users to a million: contracts at the edges, idempotency in the middle, and ruthless observability everywhere.
Federation is the only thing that made GraphQL viable for me at scale. Here's the honest breakdown of what worked, what didn't, and where I still reach for plain HTTP.
Most teams use 12% of Kubernetes to solve 100% of their problems. Pick the slice you actually need and ignore the rest until you can explain why you can't.
Hybrid retrieval, structure-aware chunking, and the four reranker tradeoffs nobody warned you about — distilled from shipping a docs search system used by 400 engineers.