Opinion
Choose Boring Technology, Except Where It Matters
The advice is right and incomplete. The interesting question is where to spend your limited budget for novelty.
Kubernetes
CrashLoopBackOff: A Complete Diagnostic Flowchart
CrashLoopBackOff is not an error, it is a symptom with about nine distinct causes. Here is how to identify which one you have in under three minutes.
PostgreSQL
The Database Migration That Locked the Table for Nine Minutes
Adding a column should be instant. Sometimes it is not, and the difference is worth knowing before you run it in production.
Debugging
What Running Hosting Infrastructure Taught Me About Debugging
Five years of keeping other people's websites online rewired how I think about failure. Mostly by making the consequences immediate.
PostgreSQL
FATAL: sorry, too many clients already
Connection pooling explained through the failure it prevents, and why raising max_connections is usually the wrong fix.
Debugging
strace for Web Developers: Seeing What Your App Really 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.
Networking
429 Too Many Requests: Both Sides of Rate Limiting
How to handle being rate limited without making it worse, and how to implement limits that do not punish well behaved clients.
DevOps
Three Metrics That Would Have Caught Most of My Production 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.