Principles · · 3 min read
Boring tech on purpose: choosing an AI-predictable stack
Why I deliberately picked a boring, conventional stack for this site — and how "predictable to an AI agent" became a real, defensible selection criterion.
Senior Backend & Platform Engineer
I build systems, and I write about how they actually work.
I’m (Alex) Hung Nguyen — a hands-on engineer working on distributed systems, transaction processing, and the infrastructure that ships them. This is a showcase of clean-room R&D builds and a space for writing about engineering with concrete detail.
Selected projects
All projects → Sole designer & engineer · 2026 · featured
A correctness-first transaction core
A double-entry ledger POC that stays correct under concurrency, client retries, and mid-flight crashes.
TypeScriptNestJSPostgreSQLRedis +2
Sole designer & engineer · 2026 · featured
Dynamic Jenkins agents on GCP Spot VMs
A cost-driven CI/CD POC: ephemeral Jenkins build agents on GCP Spot VMs, provisioned per-build and destroyed after.
JenkinsGCPCompute EngineSpot VMs +3
Latest writing
All posts → Technical · · 2 min read
Elastic CI on Spot VMs: a build note
A short walk-through of my per-build Jenkins-on-GCP-Spot POC — the setup, the one decision that made it fast, and why preemption is a non-event.
Technical · · 4 min read
Server-side share images with NestJS, BullMQ and GCS
How I render dynamic social share images in a background worker — and the duplicate-render race condition that only showed up under real load.
Leadership · · 5 min read
The CTO’s Dilemma: Balancing Speed, Quality, and Innovation in Product Development
Every CTO faces a fundamental challenge: how to deliver innovative products quickly while maintaining high quality and scalable architecture. Move too fast, and you risk accumulating technical debt.