When the aquarium went dark
2020.228The checklist ports to Slack. The hazard lights are still wired. Nobody filed the ticket.
Writing
2020
2019
The board stayed green
2019.295The board put us ahead of every customer ticket - until it stayed green while the data underneath it went wrong.
Learning Postgres under fire
2019.258The index was there. The query was right. Postgres stopped using it anyway.
The loyalty engine
2019.201Points are integers. The hard part is time, and users who think faster than your rules.
Prescaling for a known spike
2019.074Autoscale never helped in the time of crisis. What helped was prescaling -- capacity ready before the traffic arrives.
2018
Consul in practice
2018.253Service discovery, health checks, and dynamic config across a growing fleet of microservices -- and the moment KV store got too popular.
The compiler as first reviewer
2018.199How a growing team adopted Go -- not through boot camps, but through code review, shadowing, and a compiler that wouldn't let anyone be sloppy.
The week pgbouncer stopped being news
2018.193Transaction pooling, one SET that didn't stick, and a standup that moved on.
A week before the sale
2018.154The checklist is the same as last year. That's the point.
The GraphQL buffer
2018.110A GraphQL gateway that started as a unified API layer for clients became the place where we could intervene without touching the backends.
The war room
2018.041The prep runs out ninety minutes in. The rest is improvised on a floor where nobody leaves.
2017
The same tree, twice
2017.265I've built a rules engine twice, in two languages, at two scales. The tree is the same.
Designing a wallet
2017.232What a digital wallet looks like underneath -- a balance, a ledger, idempotency keys, and the gap between moving money and moving money correctly.
The promocode engine
2017.201A rules engine that answers yes or no during checkout, with condition trees built by people who don't code.
Hazard lights
2017.161We wired physical lights to 5xx alerts. It changed how the team reacts to production issues.
Nginx load balancing decisions
2017.138Algorithm selection, passive health checking, per-endpoint rate limiting, and upstream timing -- the decisions that matter when Nginx sits in front of production traffic.
Training a team on a language nobody knows
2017.105Pair-writing a real service, asking questions instead of correcting syntax, and waiting for the style guide until after the team has scars.
The first service
2017.074Picking the first piece to cut from a Perl monolith, rewriting it in Go, and switching over before you lose your nerve.
2016
Switching to Go
2016.342Migrating a payment processing API from Node.js to Go -- what changed, what improved, and what we gave up.
2015
Building with one other person
2015.084What a codebase looks like when two people build everything -- 350 commits, and a todo list with two items.