DevOps
What to Do in the First Ten Minutes of an Incident
The instinct is to start investigating. The first ten minutes are better spent on four other things, and doing them makes the investigation faster.
Debugging
Print Debugging Is Underrated and I Will Defend It
Using a debugger is supposedly the mark of a serious engineer. Print statements are supposedly what beginners do. Both of those claims are wrong.
AI
Why AI Generated Code Passes Tests and Still Breaks Production
Green CI, clean review, broken production. The gap is that tests check whether code matches the implementation and production checks whether it matches reality.
AI
The Six Bugs AI Coding Agents Write Most Often
After reviewing a lot of agent generated pull requests, the same six failure patterns keep appearing. They share a structure: locally plausible, globally wrong.
AI
Multi Agent Systems Fail in the Handoffs
Each agent works fine alone. Chain them and quality collapses. The failure is almost always at the boundary between them.
Python
Debugging asyncio Deadlocks and the Blocking Call Checklist
Your async service handles ten requests a second and pegs one core. Somewhere a synchronous call is blocking the event loop.
Shopify
Your Shopify Theme Broke After an App: Find the Culprit
Add to cart stopped working, the layout shifted, or the page throws a console error. A systematic way to find which app did it and what to do about it.
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.
Networking
Your Webhook Handler Will Be Called Twice; Plan For It
At-least-once delivery means duplicates are normal operation, not an edge case. Here is how to build a handler that survives them.
Databases
Your Cache Serves Stale Data and the Bug Is Invalidation
Reading from cache is easy. Knowing when to remove something is where the bugs live, and most of them are races.
Shopify
Shopify Theme Scores 40 on Lighthouse: The Fix Order
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…
JavaScript
Debugging Slow TypeScript Builds With generateTrace
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.