Cenedy Udoy Palma

Most of my work is backend architecture: taking a business requirement that is vague and turning it into a system that is specific, testable and maintainable by someone who is not me. In practice that means Laravel and PHP for larger transactional applications, Node.js and TypeScript for real-time and API-heavy services, and Python where data and machine learning are involved.

I also build the front end when a project needs it — React and Next.js — which mostly makes me a better API designer, because I have to consume what I build.

I have come to believe that most software problems are really boundary problems. Code does not become unmaintainable because it is long; it becomes unmaintainable because everything can reach everything, so no change is local and no change is safe.

So I spend disproportionate effort on where the seams go — which module owns which data, what crosses a boundary and in what direction, and what happens when a dependency is slow or down. Get that right and features stay cheap to add for years. Get it wrong and no amount of test coverage saves you.

I am also fairly sceptical of complexity that is adopted before it is needed. Microservices, event sourcing and elaborate abstractions all solve genuine problems, and all cost more than they look like they will. I prefer a well-structured monolith until there is a concrete reason to split it.

This site is where I publish two kinds of writing. The engineering blog covers problems I have actually had to solve — scaling WebSockets past a single process, keeping a large Laravel codebase from rotting, chasing Core Web Vitals, and the unglamorous work of making AI features affordable and safe.

The case studies go through real projects in more depth: the problem, the architecture I chose, the parts that turned out harder than expected, and what I would defend in a design review.

Everything here is written by me, from work I have done. I would rather publish four articles that are genuinely useful than forty that are not.

I came into software through problem-solving rather than through a single formal path, and I have kept that habit — most of what I know well, I learned because a project needed it and doing it badly was not an option.

Over the years I have delivered platforms spanning e-commerce and fulfilment, real-time messaging, mobile safety applications and AI-assisted tooling. I continue to spend deliberate time on system design and architecture, because those are the skills that stay valuable as specific frameworks come and go.

I am open to backend architecture consulting, AI product work and senior engineering roles — and I am happy to talk about system design regardless.

The fastest route is the contact page or cenedypalma@gmail.com. You can also find me on GitHub and LinkedIn.