DevOps
A Backup You Have Never Restored Is a Rumour
The backup completed every night and the restore failed in the first hour of the drill. A backup is a claim about the future restore, and claims that are…
Opinion
Blameless Postmortems Went Too Far in the Other Direction
Removing blame from incident reviews also removed accountability, and now the same decision recurs quarterly with a new author.
Security
Validating Uploads by File Extension Is Not Validation
The allowlist checked the extension, and the extension is the one field the attacker writes. A renamed payload sails through, and if the upload is served…
Opinion
Technical Debt Is the Wrong Metaphor
Debt implies a known principal, a rate and a repayment plan. Most of what we call technical debt is none of those.
Security
What Your Incrementing Order IDs Tell Your Competitors
Sequential order IDs are a public counter of your volume, and they make every authorisation bug trivially exploitable.
Opinion
Code Coverage Tells You What Ran, Not What Was Checked
Coverage counts executed lines, and a test can execute a branch while asserting nothing about it. The number rises while the protection stays flat, which is…
Error Autopsy
fork: Resource Temporarily Unavailable With 8 GB Free
The process could not fork despite plenty of free memory, and the error says resource temporarily unavailable. The resource is not RAM.
DevOps
Your Node Drain Hung Because of a Pod Disruption Budget
The node upgrade stopped at one node and the drain sat for hours. A Pod Disruption Budget with minAvailable equal to the replica count means nothing can…
Tooling
git bisect run Finds the Commit While You Get Coffee
Manual bisection is careful, slow and error prone. Automated bisection with a script that returns the right exit codes finds the offending commit in log…
Shopify
Two Discounts Stacked and the Merchant Ate the Margin
An automatic discount and a code were never meant to combine. They did, because combinability is a setting with a permissive default, and the margin on…
Security
SQL Injection Inside the ORM You Trusted
The codebase was fully parameterised except one helper that interpolated a column name into an orderBy. That single string was the injection, and the ORM…
Tooling
journalctl Is a Database and You Are Using It Like a Text File
Grepping a wall of journal output loses the structure the journal already keeps. It is a queryable database of structured fields, and the queries take…