Harry Zhao's Blog

Software development, distributed systems, and things I've built.

• Building a personalised storybook with gpt-image-2
• The Observability Stack Behind BankForge — and Why AI Agents Need It More Than You Do
• PulsePost: I built an AI pipeline that writes, approves, and publishes articles for me
• Choreography vs Orchestration: Why BankForge Uses Choreography and What It Costs You
• Saga, Outbox, and CDC: Three Patterns for Distributed Transactions (and Why We Dropped Kafka EOS)
• BankForge: A Hands-On Deep Dive into Distributed Systems Patterns
• I Went All-In on AI Coding — Here's What It Can't Do
• I Built a GraphRAG App. The Hard Part Wasn't the AI.
• How I Built This Blog in 2 Hours with Claude Code
• I Built My Own AI Agent from Scratch to Understand How They Actually Work