The dashboard nobody looks at
Most dashboards are built during an incident and never opened again. A few are worth keeping, and they look different.
#engineering
85 pieces tagged engineering,
from February 4, 2025 to September 28, 2026.
Least privilege, actually applied
Everyone agrees with the principle. Almost nobody has checked what their service can actually reach.
Reading an RFC
Specifications look impenetrable and follow strict conventions. Knowing the conventions makes them the best documentation available.
The migration that never finished
Half-completed migrations are the most expensive state a system can be in, and the most common one.
Choosing an ID
Integers, UUIDs, ULIDs, or something with meaning. The decision is permanent and it leaks into everything.
Why your tests are slow
Six causes, ranked by how often they are the real problem, and the fix for each.
The graph nobody drew
Your service dependency graph exists whether or not anyone has written it down. Writing it down takes an afternoon.
Timeouts: every one of them
A request crosses a dozen components with a timeout each, and almost nobody has ever added them up.
Java 27 and the LTS question
Six-month releases, an LTS every two years, and a decision most teams make by default rather than deliberately.
The debugging notebook
Writing down what you tried is the cheapest debugging technique there is, and almost nobody does it.
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 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.
everything else tagged #engineering 73
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