Mohit Gauniyal — Blog https://mohitgauniyal.com/blog Software Engineer, Consultant & Educator focused on designing and shipping scalable, maintainable software systems. en Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Architecture of a Large Scale Society Platform https://mohitgauniyal.com/blog/society-platform-architecture https://mohitgauniyal.com/blog/society-platform-architecture When you build software that maps to physical real estate, the naive approach usually fails. A look at the core system design, the tough architectural decisions, and why these decisions were made. Engineering Decisions Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT The shortest path already exists. Nobody's using it. https://mohitgauniyal.com/blog/the-shortest-path-already-exists https://mohitgauniyal.com/blog/the-shortest-path-already-exists Everything travels to the cloud and back, even when it's just two metres away. I'm exploring why we stopped questioning this 'world tour' for local data and how the shortest path already exists, but we're just not using it. From the Trenches Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Rate Limiter That Framed CORS https://mohitgauniyal.com/blog/the-rate-limiter-that-framed-cors https://mohitgauniyal.com/blog/the-rate-limiter-that-framed-cors A dashboard outage that looked like a CORS issue, but was actually a rate limiting + polling spiral problem—and how fixing middleware order, switching to per-user buckets, and moving to Socket.IO cut traffic by 95%. Debugging & Incidents Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT If Request B Doesn't Need A, Stop Waiting https://mohitgauniyal.com/blog/if-request-b-doesnt-need-a-stop-waiting https://mohitgauniyal.com/blog/if-request-b-doesnt-need-a-stop-waiting Ship only what’s visible, parallelize what you can, mitigate first, and make “fast” feel progressive, not perfect. From the Trenches Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT Anticipation Is Not Optimization https://mohitgauniyal.com/blog/anticipation-is-not-optimization https://mohitgauniyal.com/blog/anticipation-is-not-optimization A real-world case of how pre-computing, aggressive caching, and waterfall-style flows created unnecessary system load—and how delaying work made the system simpler and more predictable. Engineering Decisions Tue, 07 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT Don't Cache on Timers. Cache on Events. https://mohitgauniyal.com/blog/dont-cache-on-timers-cache-on-events https://mohitgauniyal.com/blog/dont-cache-on-timers-cache-on-events Your cache is fast. Your database is correct. But your UI still shows stale data for 60 seconds. This is the story of ghost states, O(N) pain at scale, and why event-aware invalidation beats timer-based caching every single time. From the Trenches Sat, 21 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT Machine Learning Through First Principles, Not Buzzwords https://mohitgauniyal.com/blog/machine-learning-through-first-principles-not-buzzwords https://mohitgauniyal.com/blog/machine-learning-through-first-principles-not-buzzwords Machine Learning isn’t magic. It’s just pattern finding and thing labelling. First you see clean examples like mango pricing, then real life messy data comes in and you learn to draw a line that approximates best. That’s ML — give examples, not instructions, and the algo somehow stitches the recipe. How I’d Explain It Fri, 02 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT