Kia’s Blog

A Solutions Architect with a passion for problem-solving and continuous learning.

I studied Computer Science and now enjoy challenging myself trying to apply my knowledge to design software solutions.

I -occasionally- use this space to share my takes on technology, personal interests, and the occasional exploration of new ideas.

In my day job I act as the VP of Engineering at Toman and some of the posts written here are inspired by the challenges I face at work.

And yes, almost all of the artwork on this blog is generated with ChatGPT’s assistance.

Peers or Laborers? Notes from a Talk on Tech, Product, and What Nobody Said

A few nights ago I found myself in another one of those rooms. Same shape as the last one I wrote about: a circle of experienced people, a general topic and coffee and networking breaks. This time the subject was the relationship between tech and product teams; specifically, the friction in how they communicate, and why the two so often end up talking past each other. It’s a good topic. It’s also a trap. Everyone in a room like that has a war story, and war stories are easy to tell and very hard to learn from. So we told them. And somewhere between the third and fourth anecdote, I started noticing the things we weren’t saying - which, as usual, turned out to be the interesting part. ...

How a simpl-ish problem can scale in production environments

Building a 500K req/s IP Geolocation Service: Radix Trees, .NET 10, and the Pursuit of Sub-5ms Latency

Story behind this blog post A couple of months ago, a friend of mine approached me with a challenging problem: building a service that can identify Iranian ISPs from IP addresses at an extreme scale. The requirements were brutal: around 500,000 requests per second with a P99 latency of under 5 milliseconds. As a reference for the data load, Iran has about 10,000,000 (Ten Million) IPs allocated across roughly 50,000 CIDR ranges, and the system was gonna be in the hot path of a very high-load environment. ...

Spec-driven development meets agentic coding: specs, instructions, and an AI assistant bridging idea to implementation.

When Specs Become the Interface: Notes from a Talk on Spec-Driven Development and Agentic Frameworks

Recently, more often than not my coding sessions involve AI agents in some capacity. Whether it’s GitHub Copilot suggesting snippets, or me creating an instructions file to guide the agent’s behavior, AI has become an important part of my workflow. And a couple of nights ago I caught myself doing something that would’ve sounded ridiculous just a year ago: I was “working” without writing code. Not in the I’m procrastinating way. In the I’m building the thing way. ...

A day at Cafe Ertebat: On Seniority, Architecture, and Quiet Value

A few days ago I attended a small, invite-only tech gathering hosted by Cafe Ertebat. Think of it as a low-key salon: about a couple dozen people, all of them with at least a decade of experience, almost all with shiny titles: CTOs, VPs of Engineering, technical leads, founders. It was the kind of room you’d expect to be intimidating. It wasn’t. And that was the interesting part. Walking into an “Elite” Room I was invited through two friends and colleagues who referred me to the host. That alone set a certain expectation in my head: if this is curated, and everyone is hand-picked, then the conversation is probably going to be sharp, opinionated, and uncomfortably insightful. ...

DDD in Real Life: what it is, what it isn't, and when to reach for it

I was midway through a system-design talk when a familiar question landed: So… is DDD an architecture or a pattern? The room had many .NET folks. Heads tilted. Some smiled the “here we go” smile. Let’s answer it simply, and then go a little deeper; without buzzword gymnastics. A simple definition of DDD Domain-Driven Design (DDD) is a way of designing software by centering everything on the language and rules of the business. It gives you two kinds of tools: ...