Practical architecture
Choose patterns and technologies for the problem at hand, with attention to operability, change, and long-term cost.
Dov Rine
Software engineer, architect, and technical educator.
I design and improve software systems that need to remain understandable as they grow. My work centers on practical architecture, difficult debugging, maintainable delivery, and disciplined testing. I also mentor developers across experience levels—including “vibe coders”—as they move from making software work to understanding it, testing it, and shaping it into systems built to last.
How I work
Engineering judgment over ceremony.
Complex debugging
Trace failures across application, data, infrastructure, and integration boundaries until the actual cause is understood.
Maintainable delivery
Use clear boundaries, automated tests, and incremental modernization to make systems safer to change.
Technical clarity
Explain systems and tradeoffs in language that helps engineers and stakeholders make sound decisions.
Applied AI engineering
Work with AI-assisted development, LLM application architecture, agents and tool integration, retrieval systems, and evaluation methods.
Operational thinking
Design for deployment, observability, failure recovery, and the realities of running systems.
Technology is useful when it solves the actual problem and leaves the next person with a system they can understand.
Selected work
Evidence from systems in the real world.
A selection of outcomes across custom software, application modernization, SaaS platforms, data systems, and infrastructure.
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$5 million
Built custom software that contributed $5 million in client profit during its first quarter.
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$100,000+ / month
Helped design a web-based fee-collection system generating more than $100,000 per month.
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600%
Modernized a Java and ColdFusion monolith into Node.js and TypeScript microservices, increasing server density by 600%.
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SaaS at scale
Architected SaaS and real-time systems using microservices, PostgreSQL, Redis, WebSockets, containers, and Kubernetes.
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7 to 500 employees
Built an IT function and supporting systems through organizational growth from 7 to 500 employees and $40 million in revenue.
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Self-service systems
Developed multi-tenant administration software and self-service workflows for communications infrastructure.
Teaching & mentoring
Understanding scales further than instructions.
I teach the reasoning behind the work so people can make better decisions when the example no longer fits.
Capabilities
A broad toolkit, organized around the work.
- Architecture
- Distributed systems, microservices, SaaS and multi-tenant systems, APIs and integrations, application modernization
- Engineering
- Python, Go, Java and Kotlin, TypeScript and JavaScript, PHP, modern web applications
- Data & messaging
- PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, RabbitMQ
- Delivery & quality
- Test-Driven Development, automated testing, complex debugging, maintainability
- Applied AI
- AI-assisted development, LLM application architecture, retrieval, agents and tool integration, evaluation
- Platforms & delivery
- Linux systems, bare-metal provisioning, AWS, Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Puppet, Vagrant, and CI/CD with GitHub, GitLab, and Jenkins