Engineering Culture
Feature Flags Are Technical Debt With a Good Excuse
They are genuinely useful and every one you leave in place multiplies the number of code paths nobody tests. Here is how to keep the benefit.
Engineering Culture
They are genuinely useful and every one you leave in place multiplies the number of code paths nobody tests. Here is how to keep the benefit.
Networking
At-least-once delivery means duplicates are normal operation, not an edge case. Here is how to build a handler that survives them.
Shopify
Liquid has no query log, so N+1 problems are invisible until the page is slow. Here is how to find them with Server-Timing and how to restructure the loops.
Databases
Reading from cache is easy. Knowing when to remove something is where the bugs live, and most of them are races.
Deep Dive
Traditional VMs take thirty seconds. Firecracker takes 125 milliseconds. The difference is everything it refuses to do.
Shopify
Most Shopify performance advice is a list of tips in no particular order. Here is how to measure first, find the actual cause, and fix things in the order that matters.
AI
Every mitigation at the model layer can be worked around. The fix is architectural: assume the model will be compromised and limit what it can do.
DevOps
A build system with production credentials and the ability to run arbitrary code from a pull request is the most under-secured part of most stacks.
Shopify
I build Shopify themes for a living, which makes me exactly the wrong person to ask and exactly the right person to ask. Here is where each platform actually wins.
JavaScript
Your editor takes four seconds to show a type error and tsc takes two minutes. There is a profiler for this and almost nobody uses it.
Kubernetes
Exit code 137, a memory graph that looks perfectly healthy, and no application error. Here is why your monitoring missed it and how to find the real number.
Networking
Every response is a success as far as HTTP is concerned. That one design decision breaks monitoring, retries, and error handling unless you plan for it.