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© 2026 Cristian Najera

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Thinking out loud

Notes on engineering, architecture, and the craft of building software.

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Evals Are the Product

Why treating evaluations as a first-class product concern is the difference between shipping reliable LLM applications and guessing.

2026-04-28 · 4 min · AI · Testing

AITesting
2026
2026-07-21

Why I Still Reach for Boring Python First

I default to stdlib and dataclasses until complexity is earned. Here is the heuristic I use to decide when a framework is worth the overhead.

PythonOpinionEngineering
3 min
2026-03-10

Server Components in Production

Patterns and pitfalls from migrating a Next.js app to React Server Components.

ReactNext.js
1 min
2026-02-18

Type-Safe APIs with Zod

How runtime validation and static types can coexist without duplication.

TypeScriptZod
1 min
2026-01-05

The Case for Boring Technology

Why choosing well-understood tools leads to faster delivery and fewer surprises.

ArchitectureOpinion
1 min
2025
2025-11-14

RAG Pipelines at Scale

Scaling retrieval-augmented generation from prototype to production with OpenSearch.

RAGPython
1 min
2025-09-22

Event-Driven Architectures: Lessons Learned

Three years of Kafka in production — what worked, what didn’t.

ArchitectureKafka
1 min
2025-07-08

Testing LLM Applications

Strategies for deterministic testing when your outputs are non-deterministic.

TestingAI
1 min
2025-04-30

FastAPI Beyond Hello World

Dependency injection, middleware patterns, and production-ready error handling.

PythonFastAPI
1 min
2024
2024-12-01

Infrastructure as Code with CDK

Moving from CloudFormation YAML to type-safe TypeScript constructs.

AWSTypeScript
1 min
2024-11-01

Solving Page-Number Citations in Azure AI Search Without Re-indexing

How we added exact page citations to an Azure AI Search RAG pipeline without touching the index — using byte offsets already in the data.

Azure AI SearchRAGPythonAzure
4 min
2024-08-15

Migrating to Async SQLAlchemy

A practical guide to async database access in Python without the footguns.

PythonSQLAlchemy
1 min
2024-05-20

CI/CD for ML Models

Automated training, evaluation, and deployment with GitHub Actions and SageMaker.

MLOpsCI/CD
1 min
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  • Zod1
  • Kafka1
  • FastAPI1
  • AWS1
  • Azure AI Search1
  • Azure1
  • SQLAlchemy1
  • MLOps1
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