The queues you did not know you had
Every fixed-size resource is a queue. Most of them are unmonitored, and that is where latency hides.
latest · issue 215 · September 3, 2026
The annual Postgres upgrade you keep deferring
A new major version every autumn, a five-year support window, and a migration that gets worse the longer you leave it.
The interface is the product
Users cannot see your architecture. They can see the six seconds it takes to do the thing they came for.
What a good incident channel looks like
The chat log is where the incident is actually run. Four conventions make it useful rather than a wall of noise.
Rust's six-week metronome, seven years on
A release every six weeks, no exceptions, no marketing cycle. What that cadence actually produces.
The API you ship to yourself
Internal interfaces get none of the care external ones do, and they are the ones you'll live with longest.
Shell scripts that outlive you
Six lines at the top of a bash script are the difference between a tool and a trap.
The cost of a 500
Error rates get tracked as a percentage. Users experience them as a specific person having a specific bad day.
How to run a spike
Timeboxed investigation is the cheapest way to buy certainty, and most teams do it in a way that produces neither certainty nor code.
Boring technology, revisited
The innovation-token argument is a decade old and still right, with one amendment nobody makes.
The service you should not have written
A checklist for the moment before you create a new deployable, when saying no is still free.
Reading a flame graph
The single most useful performance visualisation, and the four shapes worth recognising in one.
What "done" actually means
Every team has a definition of done and most of them are a checklist nobody reads. Here is the version that changes behaviour.
Go 1.27 and the six-month metronome
Go ships every February and August, has done for a decade, and the predictability is worth more than any feature in it.
The load-bearing comment
Most comments restate the code and rot. A few carry information the code cannot express, and those are worth defending.
Two hundred pieces in
What writing in public taught me about engineering, what I was most wrong about, and why the archive is the point.
The AI Act's high-risk obligations take effect today
Two years after entry into force, the substantive requirements arrive. What changes, what was delayed, and what to do now.
Two years of agentic coding: what stuck
The workflows that survived contact with real work, the ones that did not, and what the whole thing actually changed.
Deleting code is the highest-value work nobody schedules
Every line you remove is one that cannot break, cannot be misread, and does not need to be maintained.
The performance budget
A number, agreed in advance, that fails the build. The only mechanism that has ever kept a system fast.