Tooling
pg_stat_statements Is the Query Ledger You Never Opened
The extension records every query's call count, total time and rows, normalised by shape, and the slow query you chase for a week is one aggregation away…
Code Review
Reviewing a Terraform Diff for the Resource It Will Replace
A one character change to an immutable attribute shows as a tidy edit in the diff and executes as a destroy plus create, and the review that prices the edit…
Tooling
Reading a Container Image With docker history
Every layer is a transaction and the ledger never lies. docker history shows the secret you deleted, the cache you paid for and the compiler you shipped…
Tooling
Reading a HAR File Like a Flight Recorder
The browser recorded the entire incident, every request, every wait, every byte, before anyone knew there was one.
Shopify
A Performance Budget That Survives Contact With a Real Store
Performance work that is not enforced gets undone within a quarter. Here is the budget I use, the numbers behind each limit, and how to fail a build on it.
Tooling
The strace Output That Showed the File Was Never Opened
The config was ignored and the logs said nothing, and the syscall trace showed the open call failing on a path that differed by one character from the path…
Shopify
How to Tell Which App Is Actually Slowing Your Store Down
Uninstalling apps one at a time and re-running Lighthouse is not a method. Here is how to attribute main thread time and bytes to a specific app in one pass.
Tooling
Reading /proc Like a Dashboard
The kernel already exports every counter you would install an agent to collect. The files under /proc are the metrics endpoint, and reading them is the…
Performance
The Token Bill Is a Performance Metric, and Yours Is Unread
The invoice tripled with no traffic change, because the prompts tripled, and nobody was reading tokens as a metric.
Debugging
Debugging an Agent That Will Not Reproduce Its Own Mistake
The agent broke the build once, and no rerun would do it again, because the failure was a draw from a distribution, not a function of the input.
DevOps
Running Agents in CI Needs Budgets, Gates and a Kill Switch
The pipeline gained an autonomous step and, with it, a workload that could loop, spend and touch production at three in the morning.
Tooling
The Sandbox Checklist for Letting an Agent Touch Real Tools
The agent was given a shell and, eventually, a mistake. The boundary that made the mistake cheap was not the model's judgement but the sandbox: disposable…