Engineering

When you subscribe to a blog that only offers a snippet in its RSS feed, you’re left with a choice. Click through to the website and wade through popups, newsletter modals, and cookie banners, or use full text extraction to get clean content directly in your reader. That extraction process relies on readability algorithms, and understanding how they work helps explain why they sometimes nail the content and other times miss the mark entirely. ...

I spent the first few months of building Stratum using a conventional backend stack. You know the type: a framework with all the bells and whistles, an ORM layer that abstracted away database calls, and a collection of middleware that I barely understood but knew I needed. Everything worked fine until it did not. The RSS fetching logic grew more complex with each new feature, the AI summarization pipeline demanded careful rate limiting, and push notifications needed their own reliability guarantees. My codebase became a tangle of dependencies and configuration files that took longer to maintain than the features themselves. ...