Ten years of building backend systems. This is where I write about how I think. Not what I built.
The posts are about decisions. Why I chose one thing over another, what I got wrong before I got it right, what I'd do differently now. The reasoning behind calls made in production that don't fit anywhere else.
I write this partly so others can learn from it, partly so I can. Putting the reasoning down forces you to find out whether you actually understood it.
Worth reading
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2020
I had built real isolation for our service. It didn't matter. The thing that actually broke was one layer beneath all of it.
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2024
We had a vision and no idea what to build first. Weeks passed. I tried something. Not because it was the right answer, but because I'd run out of ways to think.
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2023
I fixed every engineering problem I walked into. There was one I never thought to ask. By the time I found it, some of the cost was already paid.
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2021
We thought it was a traffic problem. It wasn't. The actual root cause took longer to name. The fix was more drastic than anyone expected.