Notes
Blog
Technical notes on system design, tradeoffs, and lessons from production.
6 articles
Articles
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Idempotency keys: the boring API property that saves you on Tuesday night
Why duplicate submissions happen, how idempotency keys change the failure modes you sleep through, and where they are not worth the complexity.
- APIs
- Reliability
- System design
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A postmortem template that engineering managers actually read
A compact structure for post-incidents: timeline, customer impact, contributing factors, and corrective actions—without moralizing.
- Operations
- Leadership
- Postmortems
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Meaningful SLIs for APIs teams will not argue about
Pick signals tied to user journeys, avoid vanity metrics, and set error budgets that change behavior instead of decorating dashboards.
- SRE
- Observability
- SLIs
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When to carve a service out of a monolith (and when not to)
A decision checklist: team boundaries, deployment cadence, data cohesion, and the hidden tax of distributed debugging.
- Architecture
- Microservices
- Tradeoffs
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Schema migrations without the Friday deploy prayer
Expand-contract patterns, lock risks, and communicating database changes to teams who just want to ship.
- Databases
- PostgreSQL
- Migrations
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Container lessons I care about more than the Dockerfile syntax
Developer experience, deterministic images, secrets, and why 'it runs in Docker' is not the same as production-ready.
- Docker
- DevEx
- Production