Structured logs with a request ID, or none at all
The claim Free-text log lines without a correlation identifier are not diagnostic data. They are a diary. During an incident you cannot answer the only question that matters — what...
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Insights & tutorials
Engineering notes, infrastructure deep dives and practical guides from the Exotecho team.
Your domain registrar is your single point of failure
The claim Businesses spend real money on redundant servers, replicated databases and multi-region backups, then protect the domain name that points at all of it with a shared passw...
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Never send email from inside a web request
The claim Any call to a third-party service inside a request handler makes that service a hard dependency of your application. Sending mail synchronously means your order confirmat...
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One second of micro-caching absorbs a traffic spike
The claim Caching a dynamic page for one second sounds pointless. It is the single highest-leverage configuration change available to a small site, because it converts an unbounded...
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An SLA that promises response time promises nothing
The claim Nearly every IT support agreement in this market is written around response time. A one-hour response commitment is satisfied by an automated ticket acknowledgement. It o...
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Images, not JavaScript, are what your pages weigh
The claim On a typical content or commerce site, images account for the majority of transferred bytes — usually 55% to 75% — and the fix is a build step you configure once, not a f...
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Four alerts that wake someone up, and nothing else
The claim If more than four conditions in your system are permitted to page a human at three in the morning, none of them will be taken seriously by March. Alert fatigue is not a d...
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Ship every schema change as two deploys
The claim A migration that changes the shape of a table and the code that reads it in the same deploy cannot be rolled back. During the seconds or minutes when old and new applicat...
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Fixed-price web projects punish the client who learns
The claim A fixed-price software contract does not remove your risk. It sells you the risk back at a markup and then charges you again, through change orders, every time you learn...
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