Epic Mikey

  • On the Vector Store I Didn’t Ask For

    I asked Claude for Hazelcast’s VectorCollection and got a from-scratch brute-force vector store instead. It became the Community Edition fallback.

  • Vector Similarity Search on Hazelcast with HNSW

    Add semantic “more like this” search to Hazelcast microservices with HNSW vector indexing and local embeddings — no API keys, O(log n) lookups.

  • On Debugging by Assumption

    I blamed the saga timeouts on a maxed-out laptop. Four real bugs later — a circuit breaker tripping on business errors — measurement beat assumption.

  • Saga Pattern: Distributed Transactions Without 2PC

    Saga pattern vs two-phase commit: local transactions and compensating events, not distributed locks. Choreography, state machines, and timeouts on Hazelcast.

  • A Note on Observability

    A short interstitial on why the observability post got pushed back to later in the series — and why that didn’t change anything about when to instrument the code. Instrument early; you’ll thank yourself at 2 AM on phase 3.

  • Hazelcast Materialized Views: CQRS for Sub-ms Reads

    Event sourcing makes writes easy — but queries? Hazelcast materialized views + CQRS: pre-computed projections, sub-ms reads, no HTTP fan-out across services.

  • Hazelcast Jet Event Pipelines: A Six-Stage Walkthrough

    Hazelcast Jet’s six-stage pipeline turns an event into a persisted record, view update, and notification in under a millisecond — and the traps to avoid.

  • Event Sourcing on Hazelcast: A Practical Introduction

    Every UPDATE destroys information. Event Sourcing on Hazelcast stores events, not state — fast writes, Jet pipelines, sub-millisecond materialized views.

  • How Baseball Invented Event Sourcing 150 Years Ago

    Event Sourcing isn’t a 2020s pattern — it’s the baseball scorecard, written 150 years ago. Append-only logs, derived state, full audit trail in pencil.

  • Launching a Claude Code Project: Design Before You Build

    How to launch a Claude Code project: nine design documents from Claude’s desktop interface, then a handoff to Claude Code — all before writing any code.