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...
#Reliability
Writing on keeping systems dependable under load, change, and failure.
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
Software development involves both creating and maintaining systems. Once you put anything into production, reliability becomes critical. When your systems are not reliable, you...
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...
Becoming a Rockstar Engineer
In the software development realm, people often debate about 10x engineers or rockstars. But what does that really mean? How can you become one? There isn’t an easy answer, but...
Silent Guardians of Quality
In the realm of software development, testers are the silent guardians. Their role is often misunderstood and underappreciated, especially when they do their job so well that 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 scoreboard, something...
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
Engineering principles give teams a practical foundation for how to build and operate software. They guide decisions, shape behaviours, and help groups stay aligned even as syst...
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 used for the negative consequences of an action. The incident comes from an action that fails to result in the expected outcome. For instance, deploying a code to...
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...
Simple Mutual Exclusion
When we design services for high availability, we often deploy more than one instance of the same application. It might be two servers behind a load balancer or a few nodes shar...
You Know State Is NO Good
Every engineer learns this the hard way. You think the logic is solid, your tests are green, and your deployment goes smoothly. Looks all good, right? Then you have an outage. N...
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...
Local vs Production Debugging
I have been debugging this data workflow tool we built in house lately. It has an Angular UI and a Java backend, and it moves data between different systems like Postgres to Hiv...
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...