Database sharding can solve a scaling problem. It can also create five new ones. Infrastructure & Architecture System Design Patterns & Trade-offs Nov 05, 2026 2 min read Read More
One slow microservice can make your entire Rails application slow. Production & Reliability Error Handling & Reliability Patterns Nov 03, 2026 1 min read Read More
Our Sidekiq queue was growing. Adding more workers wasn't solving the problem. Production & Reliability Rails Performance Tuning & Scaling Oct 30, 2026 2 min read Read More
Your Rails application can have a security vulnerability in code your team never wrote. Tech Leadership & Strategy Rails & DevOps Ecosystem Trends Oct 26, 2026 1 min read Read More
The hardest part of leading a team isn't delegating tasks. It's letting go of being the person who solves everything. Tech Leadership & Strategy Engineering Culture & Team Scaling Oct 22, 2026 1 min read Read More
Our Rails app was handling file uploads. Then file processing started affecting everything else. Engineering for Growth Scaling Challenges & Real-World Trade-offs Oct 19, 2026 2 min read Read More
Six months of refactoring can still fail if you don't decide what to remove first. Engineering for Growth Technical Debt & Strategic Refactoring Oct 15, 2026 2 min read Read More
Kubernetes can reduce infrastructure constraints and increase your engineering costs at the same time. Infrastructure & Architecture DevOps & Infrastructure-as-Code Oct 13, 2026 2 min read Read More
Redis started as a performance optimisation. Then production started depending on it. Infrastructure & Architecture AWS Architecture & Cost Optimization Oct 08, 2026 1 min read Read More
If the same engineer gets paged every time production breaks, you don't have an on-call rotation. Production & Reliability Incident Response & Post-Mortems Oct 05, 2026 1 min read Read More
A third-party service went down. Our Rails application stayed available. Production & Reliability Error Handling & Reliability Patterns Oct 01, 2026 1 min read Read More
Your Git strategy can create more engineering problems than your code does. Tech Leadership & Strategy Tech Strategy for Early-Stage Startups Sep 28, 2026 2 min read Read More
DevOps is not becoming serverless. It is becoming more abstract. Tech Leadership & Strategy Rails & DevOps Ecosystem Trends Sep 24, 2026 2 min read Read More
Our data pipeline didn't become difficult because we had too much data. Engineering for Growth Data Architecture Decisions at Scale Sep 21, 2026 2 min read Read More
We didn't move to Elasticsearch because Active Record was slow. Engineering for Growth Scaling Challenges & Real-World Trade-offs Sep 17, 2026 1 min read Read More
The wrong message queue doesn't fail on Day 1. It becomes expensive when you scale. Infrastructure & Architecture System Design Patterns & Trade-offs Sep 14, 2026 2 min read Read More
Our Rails deployment worked perfectly. Until we had to recreate it. Infrastructure & Architecture DevOps & Infrastructure-as-Code Sep 10, 2026 1 min read Read More
Your Rails app can have plenty of CPU and memory and still crash under load. Production & Reliability Rails Performance Tuning & Scaling Sep 07, 2026 1 min read Read More
An incident review isn't successful because the incident is documented. It's successful when the same incident becomes harder to repeat. Production & Reliability Incident Response & Post-Mortems Sep 03, 2026 2 min read Read More
If the same engineer gets paged every time production breaks, you don't have an on-call process. You have a dependency. Tech Leadership & Strategy Engineering Culture & Team Scaling Aug 31, 2026 1 min read Read More