Jatin Jain Saraf — Engineering Blog

A Node.js Patch You Shouldn't Skip On October 21, 2026, Node.js shipped security releases for all three supported lines.

The Problem Every Indexer Hits Eventually A blockchain indexer starts life as one process reading one block at a time.

How a B-Tree Really Reads, Inserts, Updates and Deletes (and Where It Fails a Blockchain Indexer) Every indexer I have worked on started the same way.

Turning Your Blockchain Indexer Into a Paid API Without Slowing Down Your Explorer Your indexer has done the hard part.

Your Postgres Indexes Can Break Without a Single Line of Code Changing The ticket says a customer can't log in.

Nobody gets paged because of a primary key type.

How PostgreSQL TOAST turned unbounded JSONB arrays into a 5TB storage problem, and how we moved the hot path out without taking the indexer offline.

An `UPDATE` statement returns in two milliseconds.

An ORM is a translator sitting in a business meeting.

A Reliability-Hardening Sprint: Isolation, Guardrails, and a Query Plan That Went From 45 Million to 206 The easiest reliability work to justify is the kind that follows an outage.

A Type Migration Across Three Services: VARCHAR to BIGINT at Scale A block height stored as text instead of a number sounds like a small, easily-forgiven decision, and for a long time it is.

Built for a Multi-VM Future: The RPC v4 Readiness Work Some engineering work happens in response to an incident.

Becoming the Readiness Gate for Another Team's Scale-Up Most engineering work gets justified by its own metrics: faster, cheaper, more reliable.

What It Would Take to Hit 500K TX/Sec, and Why That's the Honest Answer Capacity planning conversations have a predictable failure mode: someone names a big target number, and the answer that gets built is optimized for sounding capable of hitting it, not…

From a Redis Relay to a Direct Feed: Rebuilding the Real-Time Pipeline The old design for getting live block and transaction data onto SupraScan's frontend worked, and that's part of what makes it a useful case study.

One Codebase, Five Blockchain Environments SupraScan runs against five separate blockchain environments today: production mainnet, production testnet, a MultiVM development network, and two independent microchains.

Paying Down Three Years of JSONB Debt JSONB earns its place in a blockchain indexer's schema honestly.

Concurrency Design Under High TPS: Moving Wallet Counters Off Database Triggers Four automation wallets, each targeted by roughly 500 automation tasks landing in the same block, was enough to stall the indexer for three to four days.

Exact Analytics in 12KB: Hardening a Wallet-Uniqueness System How many distinct wallets touched the network in the last hour.

Scaling a Blockchain Database From a Single Partition to 4.6 TB In 2021, SupraScan's transaction tables lived in a single partition each.

An order gets saved to Postgres.

Most backend systems get a quiet window somewhere.

# Elasticsearch Isn't Dead.

# Why Your Docker Image Is 3GB and Nobody Noticed Until the Deploy Timed Out A service that used to deploy in ninety seconds now takes six minutes.

# Why Postgres and Cassandra Made Opposite Bets on Storage Engines A write-heavy ingestion table starts slow on Postgres.

# The Codebase You Sit In Rubs Off On You Spend all day at a fish market and you'll leave smelling like fish, even if you never touched one.

For as long as PostgreSQL has existed, reading a page from disk has looked the same: a backend process calls `read()`, the OS schedules the I/O, and the process blocks until the page comes back.

## First, What Are We Even Searching?

> 500 requests a second are hitting a dependency that is completely dead.

> Your database CPU is at 20%.

# PostgreSQL 19 vs. 18: What Actually Changed, Feature by Feature Every major PostgreSQL release gets the same LinkedIn headline treatment: "this changes everything."

# Idempotency Keys: How to Make Retries Safe in Distributed Systems A customer clicks "Pay Now" once.

You've felt this before: you restart a service, or open your laptop after the weekend, and everything is sluggish for the first few minutes.

# Why a Single ALTER TABLE Can Take Down Your Whole Database A team runs a routine migration: `ALTER TABLE transactions ADD COLUMN region TEXT`.

# What the PostgreSQL Server Is Actually Doing When you run `CREATE DATABASE`, PostgreSQL creates a directory.

# Competition Is Inevitable.

# Transactions and ACID in Practice: What Every Backend Developer Must Know The money left Alice's account.

There's a moment in most senior engineers' careers that nobody warns you about.

If you've been working with web applications for a while, you know that the database is often the central nervous system of your app.

When building at scale, answering a seemingly simple question like *"How many unique users visited our site today?"

# Ownership Mindset: Thinking Beyond Assigned Tasks 🧠 Ownership Mindset: Thinking Beyond Assigned Tasks One thing I’ve learned in engineering (and honestly, in life) is this: Anyone can complete tasks.

# The React Server Components Vulnerability That Shocked the Web Ecosystem 🚨 The React Server Components Vulnerability That Shocked the Web Ecosystem (Dec 2025) In the last few weeks, the React community faced one of its most serious security incidents, a…

# A Redis Command That Quietly Solves One of the Hardest Problems in High-Concurrency Systems A Redis command that quietly solves one of the hardest problems in high-concurrency systems.

# The Impact of Words in Professional & Personal Spaces The Impact of Words in Professional & Personal Spaces Words have more weight than we realise, especially when used as “jokes.”

# The Responsibility Behind Honest Feedback 🌱 The Responsibility Behind Honest Feedback Feedback is often spoken about as a tool for improvement.

# Professionalism Isn't Rigidity — It's Responsibility Professionalism Isn’t Rigidity ==> It’s Responsibility In every organisation, work flows through multiple people, teams, and systems.

# Microservices Don't Collapse Because They're "Too Complex" Microservices don’t collapse because they’re “too complex.”

# Your Blockchain Indexer Is Fine — Until It Isn’t What nobody tells you about hitting 20–30 TB of indexed blockchain data, and why “just optimize it later” is the most expensive sentence in… * * * ### Your Blockchain Indexer Is Fine — Until It Isn’t > Wh…

# Database Efficiency 101: Understanding Bloat, Vacuum, and the Power of pg\_repack In a high-performance database environment, how we manage storage is just as important as how we write our queries.

# The Power of LATERAL Joins: Turning SQL into a "ForEach" Loop Most developers exclusively use an ORM — Prisma, Sequelize, Hibernate — which means they may never actually learn how to "loop" in SQL.