The Quest Begins (The “Why”) I still remember the first time I opened our analytics dashboard after a feature launch and saw the page load time creeping up to six seconds . The product team was thrilled—new filters, shiny UI—but the users were staring at a spinner like they were waiting for a bus that never arrived. I dug into the logs and there it was, the classic villain: the N+1 query problem . Picture this: we had a simple endpoint that listed blog posts with their author’s name. ...