# hovanhoa | blog

> Hồ Văn Hòa — Software Engineer. Notes on backend systems, distributed systems, and shipping things that stay calm under load.

## Posts

- [The Thundering Herd Problem in Distributed Systems](https://blog.hovanhoa.net/thundering-herd-in-distributed-systems): Three ways a thundering herd shows up in production — retry storms, cache stampedes, and planned traffic spikes — and how the industry actually deals with each one.
- [Building an AI agent in Go](https://blog.hovanhoa.net/building-an-ai-agent-in-go): What an AI agent actually is once you strip away the hype — a model, a set of tools, and a loop. I build a small tool-calling agent in Go from scratch.
- [2025 Rewind](https://blog.hovanhoa.net/2025-rewind): A quiet reflection on a year of change — switching companies, traveling almost every month, and learning to keep going.
- [Load Testing with K6](https://blog.hovanhoa.net/load-testing-k6-search-optimization): How I used k6 to measure and validate response-time improvements after optimizing our product search engine.
- [Looking back on 2024](https://blog.hovanhoa.net/looking-back-at-2024): A personal reflection on a difficult year of change, self-doubt, learning, and slowly finding direction again.
- [Live Reloading in Go](https://blog.hovanhoa.net/live-reload-in-go-with-air): A quick guide to setting up Air for live reload in Go projects to avoid manual restarts during development.
- [The CAP Theorem](https://blog.hovanhoa.net/cap-theorem-in-distributed-systems): A practical explanation of CAP theorem, trade-offs between consistency and availability, and a simple proof intuition.
- [Snowflake ID generator in distributed systems](https://blog.hovanhoa.net/why-i-chose-twitter-snowflake-id): A comparison of distributed ID generation strategies and why Twitter Snowflake was the best fit for my URL shortener.
- [Building a URL Shortener Service using Golang](https://blog.hovanhoa.net/building-a-url-shortener-service-using-golang): How to design and implement a TinyURL-like service with Go, Gin, GORM, Redis, and PostgreSQL.
- [Jenkins Pipeline - Getting Started](https://blog.hovanhoa.net/jenkins-cicd-on-aws-ec2): A practical walkthrough of CI/CD fundamentals and how to set up a Jenkins pipeline that deploys to AWS EC2.
- [Concurrency in Golang](https://blog.hovanhoa.net/go-concurrency-goroutines-channels): A practical introduction to Go concurrency concepts, including goroutines, channels, select, and wait groups.