2019: The Deep End (Legacy vs. New)

Flai

Role: Developer
Tech Stack: Kohana, PHP, MySQL, jQuery

The Story

Flai was my crash course in the reality of software development: Maintenance. I had to dig through legacy code (Kohana frameork!) to keep the system alive while simultaneously building advanced new features.

The "Aha!" Moment

I was tasked with building a bulk email system. I thought, "Easy, loop through users and send." Wrong. I hit rate limits. servers stalled. I learned the hard way about:

1. Queue implementation (don't block the main thread!).
2. Throttling (respect the API limits).
3. Error Handling (what happens when 1 out of 10,000 fails?).

This project taught me that "it works" isn't enough. It has to work at scale.