Insights
Engineering notes, infrastructure deep dives and practical guides from the Exotecho team.
The claim Deciding what your web application does based on which browser it thinks the visitor is using — reading the user-agent string and branching on it — is a technique that ha...
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The claim When a client asks for a fixed price on a software project they have described in a paragraph, the honest answer is that nobody can price it yet, because the paragraph do...
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The claim When an application is slow, the instinct is to make the slow work faster — optimise the query, add the cache, upgrade the hardware. The larger and cheaper win is usually...
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The claim Knowing that your database backups exist and even that they are valid is not the same as knowing you can recover from a disaster, because the number that determines wheth...
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The claim The hardest part of caching is not storing a value; it is knowing when the stored value has become wrong. Teams reach for elaborate invalidation schemes — tracking every...
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The claim A single slow database query, left to run without a time limit, can bring down an entire application — not because the query itself is important, but because while it hol...
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The claim Before you commit your business's data to a software vendor, the question that matters most is not what the service does but how you get your data back out if you leave —...
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The claim The software your business runs is only as reliable as your ability to rebuild it from source, and most teams discover far too late that they cannot. The application depl...
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The claim A firewall configured to block a list of bad things and allow everything else is protecting you from yesterday's threats and nothing more, because the list can never be c...
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