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MCP with Postgres - Querying my data in plain English

15th July, 2025
This post shows how I set up MCP, along with additional configuration, to query my PostgreSQL database using plain English in Cursor. I also cover when this approach works well and when it doesn't.

How I'm using Gen AI for my software development tasks [videos]

19th April, 2025
I spent the last three months rewiring my coding workflow to better it through my Gen AI usage. To do this, I tried to use Gen AI beyond fixing simple exceptions and using auto-complete. This included things like devising core logic for functionalities, building prototypes, creating exploratory scripts and understanding code. This post has video recordings of how good or bad these attempts turned out.

My experience with upgrading Strapi v4 to v5

11th Jan, 2025
Strapi v5 brings significant changes related to content versioning, API response formats, and the Plugins SDK. This post details our experience with upgrading a specific Strapi setup from v4 to v5. This includes the changes we found easy to upgrade, the aspects we found complicated and the effort it took us to execute the over-all upgrade.

How we built observability with Google Cloud services

30th December, 2024
Beyond the easy-to-reproduce bugs, there are some production issues (bugs, slowness, crashes) that are not easy to root cause. This post details how we setup observability within our production setup make it easier for us to root cause and quickly decipher the impact of such issues.

Common NewRelic RUM queries for web performance optimization

16th September, 2024
Every time I have to sift through NewRelic RUM data when optimizing a website’s speed, I have to go through past notes, reports and messages. To address this pain, this is a collection of the most common queries & other information I use as a starting point for RUM data analysis.

Customizing the Strapi Admin panel

16th Jul, 2024
Strapi Admin panel customization can mean various things. This post is specifically about modifying the existing Strapi Admin panel (the UI) behavior. For example - changing how the content manager search or filter works on the UI or changing the Strapi media library UI.

How we invalidate cache for resource-heavy & long-running requests

28th June, 2024
Cache refresh for popular API requests that are long-running and resource-heavy used to result in system unstability during the refresh-window. This post details this problem and the various solutions we evaluated. It also explains the solution we chose and the considerations while making our choice.

WordPress vs Headless CMS with a custom frontend : What is a better choice?

4th May, 2024
Strapi v4's track record with respect to version upgrades has been patchy. This post details such experiences & my attempts to overcome issues to enable more confident Strapi version upgrades.

How we prevented CDN bandwidth abuse & mitigated AWS billing spike

16th Mar, 2024
At one of my clients, our Sentry setup was reporting exceptions at the rate of 100+ exceptions per hour. This post details how we steered our Sentry setup to adequately organize this deluge of issues. And, how that, in turn, helped us effectively fix the issues.

How we setup our Strapi API test automation using Jest

23rd Feb, 2024
This post details our experience wrt. setting up automated testing of a few of our Strapi APIs. This includes - why we setup the automation testing, for what APIs and how did we go about implementing it.

Directus vs Strapi : Features, customization and pricing

7th Jul, 2025
A detailed comparison of Directus and Strapi in terms of features, customization capabilities and pricing plans for building a scalable CMS setup.

My experience with Gatsby v5 to Next v13 frontend migration

1st Jan, 2024
Our Gatsby based statically generated frontend has been in production for 3+ years. But, after living with some major content publishing pain-points for long, we decided to move to Next.js to permanently resolve them. This post details those pain-points, how we went about Gatsby ⇒ Next.js migration and our path ahead.

Finding out the most popular headless Node.js CMS

27nd Sep, 2023
An attempt to determine the most popular Headless Node.js CMS based on various metrics like library download count, website traffic, social clout, etc.

My experience with migrating Strapi v3 to v4

16th Aug, 2023
Because Strapi v4 is a major release with a large number of breaking changes, migrating a Strapi setup from v3 => v4 can be complicated. This post details how we undertook the v3 => v4 migration with a two-fold goal of upgrading without any functional / data regression in the smallest possible downtime window.

How we setup custom input validations for components in Strapi

6th July, 2023
With Strapi v4, custom input validations for fields within components cannot be coded within the collection lifecycle hooks. This blog post details why it is so and provides an alternative implementation to overcome this.

Executing stress free Strapi version upgrades : My experiences & attempts

26th June, 2023
Strapi v4's track record with respect to version upgrades has been patchy. This post details such experiences & my attempts to overcome issues to enable more confident Strapi version upgrades.

How to integrate Elasticsearch with Strapi

22nd May, 2023
This post details the implementation specifics to setup Elasticsearch with Strapi. This includes triggering Elasticsearch indexing via Strapi customization and providing a Strapi route endpoint to front the Elasticsearch search. These integrations are detailed through an example blog-post Strapi collection.

Mitigating serverless cold start delays : My experiments & observations

1st Mar, 2023
This post evaluates if frequently pinging website urls is a reliable approach to mitigate cold start delays for websites hosted on Node based serverless platforms like Vercel or Netlify.

Customizing the Strapi upload plugin

17th Dec, 2022
Customizing the Strapi upload plugin (beyond modifying it's providers) is complicated. This post details how such complicated customization can be achieved by modifying the Admin UI and server-side code.

Strapi customization options : What to use when?

6th Mar, 2025
Strapi's large number of customization options is one of the reasons behind its popularity. But, given a certain requirement, which of Strapi's customization options would be the most suitable? This post details what Strapi customization option would best suite a certain kind of CMS requirements.

How we made Sentry work to swiftly identify production issues

30th June, 2022
At one of my clients, our Sentry setup was reporting exceptions at the rate of 100+ exceptions per hour. This post details how we steered our Sentry setup to adequately organize this deluge of issues. And, how that, in turn, helped us effectively fix the issues.

My experiences with customizing the Strapi CMS

8th April, 2022
This post details the straightforward customizations as well as complicated modifications with respect to Strapi CMS. The goal of detailing the experience is to help others evaluating Strapi CMS for their CMS requirements.

My Experiences with Optimizing CSS for React Frontends

3rd Feb, 2022
Between the start of 2021 and now, I got opportunities to optimize CSS loading for three different React websites. This post details the options I considered, the criteria I evaluated and the choices I made in process of doing so.

Zero runtime CSS-in-JS : Is this where great DX meets top-notch web performance?

19th Nov, 2021
At one of my clients, we evaluated if there’s something more performant than styled-components & still keeps the developers happy. This post details the experience and findings from the exercise.
Got a web-dev pain point?
I'm an independent dev specializing in architecting React frontends, building backends with Strapi, improving web performance & scalability. To discuss your web-dev paint points, email me at punit@tezify.com..
 
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