Systems that move money have no room for "mostly works." I build payment backends where every transaction is tracked from first sight to final settlement, and where a crash, a retry, or a chain reorg never counts the same deposit twice. Boring, careful, and correct is the whole point.
Most backend problems are really data problems. I spend my time on the layer underneath the API: schemas that stay honest as the product changes, queues that survive restarts, and queries that are still fast when a table hits its millionth row. TypeScript and Postgres are where I do my best work.
There's a wide gap between an impressive AI demo and a feature people rely on every day. I build on the far side of that gap: LLM-driven products with the retries, fallbacks, and guardrails to run unattended. The model is maybe a tenth of the work. The system around it is the rest.
I'm most useful when I own the whole problem: design, backend, frontend, deployment. Small teams don't have room for "not my part of the stack," and I like it that way. Hand me something vague and I'll come back with something running.
2026-07-25
Idempotency keys for crypto deposits: deduping the same on-chain tx across restarts and re-scans
A deposit scanner will see the same on-chain transaction more than once — after restarts, re-scans, and webhook replays. The fix is a database-enforced idempotency key, and picking the right one is less obvious than it looks.
Samiul
Deposits Idempotency Indexing Postgres Reorgs
2026-07-20
What a 'valid address' actually means on Ethereum, TRON, and Solana
One chain hides its checksum in the casing, one bakes it into the encoding, and one skips it entirely. Lessons from validating deposit addresses on a payment platform that supported all three.
Samiul
Ethereum TRON Solana Addresses Checksums Payments
2026-07-13
Why we waited 32 blocks to credit Solana deposits
Solana has no mempool to watch and three commitment levels to choose from. Building a crypto payment handler, we credited deposits only at 'finalized', trading twelve seconds of delay for finality the consensus rules can't undo.
Samiul
Solana Commitment Finality Payments TowerBFT
2026-07-07
Why your first USDC send on Solana costs extra SOL
On Solana, token balances live in their own accounts, and accounts cost rent. Sending USDC to a wallet that's never held it means someone pays ~0.002 SOL to create storage. Here's who, and why.
Samiul
Solana USDC SPL Rent Fees
2026-07-05
Why your TRON USDT transfer silently failed
TRON splits fees into two independent resources: bandwidth and energy. A transfer can clear one and run out of the other mid-execution — here's what that looks like and how to avoid it.
Samiul
TRON USDT TRC-20 Fees
Samiul Alim - 2024
Dhaka, Bangladesh
