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 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 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 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 Any operation that changes something and can be retried — a payment, an order, a message send — will eventually be retried after it already succeeded, because the network...
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The claim Most application bugs and a large share of security holes come from the same root cause: data that entered the system in a shape the code did not expect, and was trusted...
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The claim The default database connection pool in most application frameworks is set to a number someone picked because it looked reasonable, and it is almost always wrong in the s...
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The claim Adding an index because a query is slow, without first reading the plan the database uses to run it, is guessing — and it frequently makes things worse, because every ind...
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