Writing — Hammad Iqbal

Field notes

Notes from building real products.

What actually happens between the demo and something people depend on — engineering practice, client work, and the decisions in between.

Product Planning·Sep 22, 2026

The scope nobody cut — they just never named it

Cutting scope means crossing something off a list. The features that blow up a timeline were never on the list to begin with, so nobody ever got the chance to decide against them.

5 min read→

Cloud & Infra·Sep 20, 2026

The cache-control header that shipped last week's bug to everyone

The fix was deployed and correct within a minute. It just didn't reach anyone, because a `max-age` set months earlier had already decided how long the old version would keep being served.

5 min read→

Frontend·Sep 19, 2026

The search box race condition nobody staged for

A debounce cuts down how many requests you send. It does nothing about which response gets rendered last — and on a real network, the wrong one wins often enough to matter.

5 min read→

More writing

22Shipping & Ops

The cron job that stopped running and nobody noticed

Alerting is built to catch a job that fails loudly. It has nothing to say about a job that simply never starts — and that's the failure mode that actually gets missed for weeks.

Sep 18, 2026 · 5 min readRead →

21Engineering

The N+1 query that only showed up with real data

Twelve seed rows in staging turn into thirteen queries and nobody notices. Four thousand rows in production turn the same line of code into a page that times out.

Sep 16, 2026 · 5 min readRead →

Notes from building real products.

The scope nobody cut — they just never named it

The cache-control header that shipped last week's bug to everyone

The search box race condition nobody staged for

More writing

The cron job that stopped running and nobody noticed

The N+1 query that only showed up with real data

Archive

The timeout you copied from a tutorial

The cache that served stale data for three days

The retry that turned a blip into an outage

The hydration mismatch you can't reproduce locally

The feature flag that outlived the feature

The connection pool that was fine until it wasn't

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