Error Autopsy
ETIMEDOUT, ECONNREFUSED, EHOSTUNREACH: Three Diagnoses
Three socket errors that read as 'the network is broken' are in fact three different answers to three different questions.
Rohit Bhadani
I write about why software breaks and how people figure it out. Founder of Krova Cloud, building isolated microVMs on our own hypervisor. Years of Shopify theme work and shared hosting before that. If I have not reproduced it, I do not publish it.
Shopify
Predictive Search Returned Nothing for a Product That Exists
The product was live, in stock and searchable from the full search page, yet the predictive suggest box returned nothing. The suggest API was not broken.
Security
The Login Redirect Parameter That Sent Users Anywhere
A next parameter that accepts any URL turns your trusted domain into the first hop of a phishing link. The user sees your hostname, trusts it, and lands…
Performance
Brotli Saved Forty Percent on Text and Nothing on Your Images
Switching to Brotli produced a celebratory chart and almost no user benefit, because the payloads that dominate the page were already compressed.
DevOps
Error Acquiring the State Lock, and the Four Things Not to Do
A stuck Terraform lock stops every deploy in the company, and the obvious fix, force unlock, is also the dangerous one.
Tooling
The curl Flag That Tells You Which Part of the Request Was Slow
A slow request is five possible slow things. One curl flag with a write-out template splits the total into DNS, connect, TLS, time to first byte and…
Code Review
Reviewing Retry Logic Before It Becomes an Outage
A retry looks like resilience and behaves like a load generator. Every retry needs a budget, jitter and an answer to what happens if the first attempt…
Opinion
Observability Platforms Sold You a Very Expensive Search Box
Ingesting everything is not observability. Most platforms give you a fast grep over a huge bill, and the ability to answer a question you did not know to…
Deep Dive
Every Layer That Caches a DNS Answer Between You and the Record
A DNS answer passes through four or five caches before it reaches your code, each with its own TTL and its own opinion.
AI
A Year of Debugging AI Generated Code
Twelve months of daily agent use, reviewed honestly. The failure modes that got better, the ones that did not, and the practices that stuck.
Bug Hunt
File Uploads Corrupted Above One Megabyte and Nothing Below
Every file under a megabyte arrived intact. Every file over it arrived truncated at exactly the same boundary.
Error Autopsy
Connection Reset By Peer at Exactly Sixty Seconds, Every Time
Every failure logged at the same number of seconds of idle time. That regularity is the diagnosis: a load balancer idle timeout killing connections your…