Opinion
The People Who Designed It Should Be on the Pager
Escalation paths that route incidents away from senior engineers also route the feedback away from the people who can fix the design.
Opinion
Nobody Looks at Your Dashboard Until Something Is Already Broken
Dashboards are built for demos and read during incidents, which is the one moment they cannot help. Monitoring that is only useful after the fact is…
Opinion
Most of Your Microservices Should Be Modules
A network call is a thousand times slower than a function call and a hundred times harder to debug. Most service boundaries were drawn for organisational…
Opinion
Observability Platforms Sold You a Very Expensive Search Box
Ingesting everything is not observability. Most platforms give you a fast grep over a huge bill, and the ability to answer a question you did not know to…
Opinion
A Test That Restates the Implementation Is Not a Test
Some tests fail every time the code changes shape and pass every time it breaks. They are not guarding behaviour, they are guarding the current arrangement…
Opinion
Your Runbook Describes a System You Do Not Have
Runbooks get written when the system is designed and never tested again. The first incident shows you the gap, at the worst possible moment, to the person…
MicroVMs
I Let an Agent Run rm -rf and Nothing Bad Happened
The question is not whether an autonomous agent will do something destructive. It is what the destruction can reach when it does.
Opinion
Five Things I Was Confidently Wrong About
Positions I argued for, sometimes loudly, that turned out to be mistaken. What changed my mind in each case.
Debugging
Your Error Messages Are a User Interface
An error message is read by a person under stress who needs to make a decision. Almost nobody designs them that way.
Engineering Culture
Most Postmortems Are Theatre and Here Is What Makes One Useful
A document nobody reads, listing action items nobody does, produced to satisfy a process. Here is the version that actually changes something.
Shopify
Hydrogen or Liquid: Which Should Your Shopify Store Run On
Headless Shopify is genuinely better for some stores and a costly mistake for most. Here is how to tell which one you are.
Debugging
The Abstraction That Made Debugging Take All Day
Every layer you add to avoid repetition adds a place where the truth can hide. Here is how to tell which abstractions earn their cost.