---
title: "imlucas.dev — Software Engineering & System Design"
description: "Software engineer sharing insights on system design, distributed systems, and the patterns behind reliable software."
url: https://imlucas.dev/
---

Software Engineer

# imlucas .dev

Turning complexity into clarity

AI deep-dives, system design breakdowns, and hard-won lessons from shipping real software. No fluff. No recycled takes. Just signal.

## Recent Posts

[View all →](https://imlucas.dev/blog)

- [How to Build with LLMs: From Prototype to Production](https://imlucas.dev/blog/how-to-build-with-llms-from-prototype-to-production) (May 9, 2026 · 9 min read)
  The full arc from prototype to production: choosing the right model, designing prompts that hold up under real traffic, managing context windows, handling failures, and deploying without burning through your budget.
- [System Observability: A Production Engineer's Guide](https://imlucas.dev/blog/system-observability-a-production-engineers-guide) (May 8, 2026 · 9 min read)
  The core signals to collect, how to instrument from day one, and the practical telemetry pipeline that takes you from raw data to lower MTTR and higher reliability, written from the pager, not the ivory tower.
- [How to Decompose a Monolith Into Microservices Safely](https://imlucas.dev/blog/how-to-decompose-a-monolith-into-microservices-safely) (May 7, 2026 · 12 min read)
  How to find clean domain boundaries, apply the strangler fig pattern, split a shared database, and set up tests, observability, and rollback so every step of the migration stays reversible.
- [8 Deployment Mistakes That Cost Engineering Teams Millions](https://imlucas.dev/blog/8-deployment-mistakes-that-cost-engineering-teams-millions) (May 6, 2026 · 11 min read)
  The eight deployment mistakes that keep showing up in postmortems, from untested migration rollbacks to missing observability, what each one actually costs, and the specific changes that prevent them.
- [Practical Microservices Patterns for Engineering Teams](https://imlucas.dev/blog/practical-microservices-patterns-for-engineering-teams) (May 5, 2026 · 10 min read)
  Four production microservices patterns, the API gateway, service mesh, circuit breaker with bulkhead, and saga, with the failure mode each one addresses, the real trade-offs, and the tools that map to each.