Ketan's Newsletter

Do you really need a Vector Search Database?

Reflections on Intercom’s decision to stick with Elasticsearch

Aug 7 • 

Ketan Bhatt

May 2025

Catch Up: Lessons Senior Engineers Know about ORMs

Think you know your ORM? Discover the subtle bugs, race conditions, and performance pitfalls many engineers miss. Learn expert strategies for Rails…

May 9 • 

Ketan Bhatt

4

1

January 2024

Avoid Common Elasticsearch Pitfalls

Useful Tips from building Conversations' Search at Intercom

Jan 25, 2024 • 

Ketan Bhatt

July 2020

Race Conditions/Concurrency Defects in Databases: A Catalogue

Or, how to create bugs that are hard to find

Jul 3, 2020 • 

Ketan Bhatt

1

June 2020

Get your code reviewed by Martin Fowler, kinda

I picked up Refactoring, by Martin Fowler, and I am learning a lot.

Jun 30, 2020 • 

Ketan Bhatt

The Nature of Software Development, by Ron Jeffries

Learnings about building Software, and Product.

Jun 6, 2020 • 

Ketan Bhatt

February 2020

Build Systems with Speed and Confidence by Closing the Loop First!

I re-learnt something recently: the importance of closing the loop on a system you are trying to build, as quickly as possible, and then adding the…

Feb 24, 2020 • 

Ketan Bhatt

January 2020

Intercom's Interview Process and My Experience

Based on my interview for a Product Engineering role in 2019

Jan 1, 2020 • 

Ketan Bhatt

August 2019

May 2019

Avoid breaking habits with help from Economics

Recently, while reading “How Will You Measure Your Life?”, I came across the concept of Marginal Thinking and I thought that it could be used as a…

May 29, 2019 • 

Ketan Bhatt

January 2019

Why do we make irrational decisions?

We often get surprised by the decisions taken by those around us.

Jan 15, 2019 • 

Ketan Bhatt

December 2018