Architecture on Blogfolio Najib

Best Practices for Building APIs in Laravel and Go: Notes from a Real Project

Thu, 07 May 2026 10:28:00 +0700

In the PHP-to-Go migration project I worked on, there was a phase where I had to audit every existing route and controller. The goal was simple: before migrating, understand which patterns are solid and which need to go. The result? Well, it was… enlightening hahaha.

The project profile looked like this:

460+ routes in api.php¹
58 controllers of various sizes and patterns
5 auth guards: user-api, partner-api, open-api, open-api-limited, tms-api
Varied rate limiting: from 3/minute up to 100/minute

This article isn’t a “how to build an API” tutorial. These are notes on patterns and anti-patterns I found, plus how the same patterns map to Go. So if you’re migrating or starting a new project, hopefully you can skip some of the mistakes I already discovered hehe~

Choosing a Tech Stack: Between Ego and Business

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

So anyway, a while back I was sitting in an internal meeting, Zoom or Google Meet, I honestly can’t remember, when a colleague suddenly lit up with enthusiasm:

“What if we migrate to microservices while we’re at it? To be modern, to be scalable, to be-”

To be what, exactly? Our system at the time had two main features, a team of four people, and traffic that barely hit a thousand requests a day on its busiest day. The case for microservices? Zero. The enthusiasm for it? A hundred hahaha.

Clean Architecture: From Spaghetti Code to Readable Code

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I once wrote code that made perfect sense at the time. The logic was clear, the flow was neat, the variables were descriptive. Three months later, I opened the same file, “what was this even supposed to do?”

If you’ve ever felt the same way, welcome. You’re not alone hehe.

This article isn’t a formal lecture on software architecture. It’s my notes on Clean Architecture, explained in a way I wish someone had told me when I was still in university, not with jargon that makes your head spin.

Decision Journal: When It's Time to Migrate Your Tech Stack

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There was a moment where I stopped typing, leaned back in my chair, and realized: “This isn’t about refactoring anymore.”

I was debugging a bug in a GPS tracker system that had been running for years¹. The bug was simple, vehicle position reports weren’t updating on the dashboard. But to fix it, I had to trace through four different files, two business logic layers tangled together, and one query written without an index. An hour later, the fix was two lines. Two lines.

Migrating Legacy PHP to Go: Why, How, and Lessons Learned

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been in a position where a PHP codebase had grown beyond its limits, new features were harder to add, bugs appeared more frequently, and every deployment felt like flipping a coin. Not because PHP is bad, but because a system built over years without clear architecture eventually becomes its own worst enemy. I remember one day having to rollback three times in a single afternoon because of a “simple” deploy. My stress level that day… yeah, let’s not go there hahaha.