Blog

Ideas and notes onsoftware and engineering.

I'm André Ferreira, a software engineer. I use this site to write in more depth about the work: how products get built, what breaks, and what I learn along the way.

The posts below are the main feed. For a fuller picture of my background, see about.

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Recent writing

Engineering Practices

Jul 2026

Why READMEs Go Stale Faster Than ADRs

A README describes the present tense, so every commit can quietly make it wrong. An ADR records a dated decision, so it ages into history instead of turning into a lie. Most stale docs are just durable reasoning stuffed into a volatile container.

Documentation ADR Engineering Practices

System Design

Mar 2026

The Real Cost of Microservices

Microservices get sold as the grown-up way to scale. For a lot of teams the invoice is ops load, slower shipping, and failure modes you would not have had in one repo. A boring monolith often buys you more runway than the conference talks admit.

Microservices Monolith Architecture

PostgreSQL as a Cache (When Not to Use Redis)

System Design

Mar 2026

PostgreSQL as a Cache (When Not to Use Redis)

Redis is not mandatory for every cache-shaped problem. With solid indexing and pooling, PostgreSQL can cover sessions, flags, and many read-heavy paths with less ops surface—until benchmarks or access patterns prove you need an in-memory layer.

PostgreSQL Redis Caching

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Recent labs

Why Sailing Fundamentals Need Interactive 3D

LabsLabs

Sep 2026

Why Sailing Fundamentals Need Interactive 3D

Built an interactive 3D sailing simulator to understand why abstract concepts (wind angles, heel, trim) only become intuitive through real-time visual feedback — learned that a 10-second interactive demo beats a semester of text; that education beats simulation accuracy; and that the tool isn't the learning, the feedback loop is.

Education Interactive Design Visualization Sailing

Documenting 10 years of engineering

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