Zack Grooms

Backend systems engineer building from first principles: state, invariants, transactions, idempotence, correctness.

Current Project

Inventory System v2 — Django + SQLite
Building a backend system focused on correctness before complexity.

Architecture

transport → service → model → database

System Model

S = Map[id → item]
item = { id, name, qty }
S' = f(S, input)
      

Endpoints

Engineering Log

Daily system-building notes and lessons learned.

Feb 2026 Implemented idempotent delete using filter(id=item_id).delete() inside transaction.atomic(). Fixed state bug caused by incorrect filtering.
Feb 2026 Implemented atomic quantity update endpoint PATCH /items/<uuid>/qty. Used guarded database update with qty__gte=-delta and F("qty") + delta to ensure invariant preservation and correctness under concurrency.

About

I focus on backend systems engineering: correctness, invariants, and designing around state.

Father of four. Engineering student. Building one feature per day and documenting the process.