Debugging
strace for Web Developers: What Your App Asks the Kernel
When your profiler shows nothing and your logs are silent, strace shows you every syscall with timings. Here is a practical subset worth knowing.
DevOps
Terraform Says It Will Destroy Something It Should Not
A plan showing forced replacement of a database is a good moment to stop. Here is how to read why, and the three ways state gets out of sync.
DevOps
Structured Logging, and What to Actually Put in a Log Line
Most logs are unqueryable prose written for a human who will never read them. Here is what makes a log line useful during an incident.
AI
Debugging an MCP Server When the Agent Just Goes Quiet
Your tool is registered, the agent knows it exists, and nothing happens. Here is how to see what is actually crossing the wire.
DevOps
Three Metrics That Would Have Caught My Incidents
Not a guide to observability platforms. Just the three signals that, in retrospect, would have given me warning before nearly everything that went wrong.
Kubernetes
Debugging DNS Inside Kubernetes When nslookup Lies
nslookup resolves and your application cannot connect. The two use different resolvers, and the difference is where the bug lives.
Networking
Your Timeouts Are Wrong and Here Is How to Set Them
A missing timeout turns a slow dependency into an outage. A badly chosen one turns a blip into a retry storm. Both are common.
Performance
Where Serverless Cold Start Time Actually Goes
Everyone blames the platform. Most of a cold start is usually your own initialisation code, and you can measure exactly which part.
JavaScript
Type Instantiation Is Excessively Deep and Possibly Infinite
TypeScript gave up. Here is why recursive conditional types hit a wall, and how to restructure so they do not.
Networking
502 Bad Gateway From Nginx: Which Side Is Actually Broken
The proxy is telling you your application failed. Here is how to read the error log line and identify which of six things went wrong.
Shopify
Liquid Error: Nothing Renders and There Is No Error Message
Liquid fails quietly by design. Here is where the error actually goes and how to make your theme tell you what went wrong.
Shopify
Shopify Checkout Extensibility: What Broke and How to Migrate
checkout.liquid is gone. Here is what actually replaces each customisation and which ones have no replacement at all.