Old Software Was Fast Because It Had No Choice
A few weeks ago we were discussing a Java component that starts a Spark cluster. Its job is mostly coordination. It starts the machinery, passes configuration around, waits for...
Articles tagged with Reliability
Reliability engineering posts on production systems, failure, resilience, operational risk, and keeping software dependable as it evolves.
Why Airport Security Feels Random
I’m about to take yet another flight, this time flying to India. I’m excited, but then I can’t seem to pass the thought of why the heck security checks are so random. I had to c...
What Good Execution Looks Like
The other day I was talking with one of my directs. We ended up discussing something we’ve both learned over the years. When execution works, the environment is quiet. Not slow....
Managers Have Been Vibe Coding All Along
Everyone’s been talking about vibe coding lately. I’ve been doing it myself. two projects. and . It’s the kind of work where you don’t analyze, architect, or overthink. You star...
Technical Deep Dives
When someone asks for a technical deep dive, they don’t care if . They want proof that you actually understand the beast you’ve built. Can you walk me through the system like yo...
Building Remote Teams
You've probably heard stories of big tech companies in US and hiring double that number in India, blaming AI for the shift. Everyone's first thought is likely cheap labor. While...
Balancing Act of Reliability
Once something is in production, you are no longer just building software. You are also keeping it alive. That sounds obvious, but teams forget it all the time. We get excited a...
Operational Skills Needed
Over the years, I've interviewed many candidates. One crucial skill that often gets overlooked is operational reflexes during oncalls. Surprisingly, few companies test for this,...
Engineering Health Essentials
Engineering health is a term that deserves far more attention than it receives. Sustainable software development is not only about the features we ship or the speed at which we...
Silent Guardians of Quality
Testers are the silent guardians of software. Their work is easy to miss when they do it well. If no critical or highpriority issues reach production, people assume there was no...
Why Metrics Don’t Equal Quality
In 1902, Hanoi was drowning in rats. The government was getting nervous about plague. Hence, the city put a bounty per rat tail. Suddenly, the system had a way to measure, somet...
Update Statements on Production
Executing update statements on a production database is always a big challenge. It’s one of those tasks that looks deceptively simple until something breaks in ways you didn’t i...
Essential Engineering Principles
A principle is only worth writing down if a team can point to it midargument and it settles the thing. Otherwise it is a poster on the wall. The ones below map to arguments ever...
Building a Technical Vision
A technical vision is the compass of an engineering organization. It sets the longterm direction. I believe it should define the "why" and "where" behind the technical choices t...
Service Overload Strategies
Service overload happens a lot. If you haven't seen one, count yourself lucky. The first time I watched it take a system down, I realized how serious it’s to get the basics righ...
Designing A Key-Value Store
I’ve been asked once to design a key value store in an interview. It looks easy at first. Then it gets hard, fast. What makes it interesting is how ambiguous it is. I started us...
Promoting Learnings in Incidents
Incidents are the negative consequences of an action that fails to produce the expected outcome. For instance, code might be deployed to production to add a new feature or impro...
Message Brokers Are Modern Grids
While working on my book on , I keep noticing the same pattern. Some systems look simple while they belong to one team and become something else after everybody starts using the...
Compatibility Is a Feature
A system only reveals what it's made of when it starts changing. At first, they often look better than they are because the code is still new. The data is still fairly clean. Th...
Before You Import That Library
Software development depends a lot on open source projects. From operating systems to editors, we use open source software everywhere. Nevertheless, we should be careful about w...
You Know State Is NO Good
A few years ago,I worked on data deletion path where we deleted connections for a person. On the deletion path, we wiped the data, confirmed the rows were gone, verified the cac...
You Cannot Fix What You Cannot See
I have been working on this data discovery tool for a while, and it keeps showing me how messy our systems really are. The idea behind it is simple. Crawl every database we have...
Ufak Servisler
Ufak servisler(micro services) son zamanlarda yazılım alanında sıkça yaygınlaşan bir yöntem. Micro'yu ufak diye çevirmek hoşuma gitti ama tahminen mikro daha çok kullanılır. Zat...
XA Transactions: A Simple Guide
In early days of computing, there was no need for distributed transactions, everything lived in one place. As number of applications increased, synchronization of the data becom...