Blog

When internet uptime drops below 40%, your microservices architecture becomes a liability, not an asset. I learned this while designing a health data exchange for African hospitals, where doctors share lab results via WhatsApp because it's more reliable than official systems. The solution wasn't better cloud infrastructure - it was edge-based routing that works offline, queues locally using PostgreSQL, and syncs when connectivity returns. Microservices optimize for Silicon Valley data centers, not rural clinics where power cuts mid-transaction. This is what happens when you design for reality instead of assumptions.

Last year on a bus to Kasoa, I watched a "preacher" distribute an unknown herbal concoction to passengers - including a little girl - who drank it willingly, trustingly. That moment crystallized Ghana's pharmaceutical crisis for me: in a country where roadside vendors, influencers, and fake prophets peddle unregulated "medicine," how do ordinary people protect themselves? With falsified drugs linked to 267,000 deaths annually in sub-Saharan Africa and media houses advertising unverified products without FDA approval, I built MedVerify - a mobile app that puts drug verification power directly in users' hands through barcode scanning, manual search, and real-time data from Ghana's FDA database

Timekeeping is a fundamental aspect of software systems, yet choosing the right type of clock can make the difference between reliable performance and subtle, hard-to-debug issues. In this article, we'll explore the two primary types of clocks, wall-clock (time-of-day) and monotonic clocks, their use cases in software development, and why selecting the appropriate clock is crucial for accuracy, performance, and system robustness. We'll include practical code examples in Python, Java, JavaScript, and Dart to demonstrate their usage.