Insights
Engineering notes, infrastructure deep dives and practical guides from the Exotecho team.
The claim A scheduled job that runs silently and is only noticed when it fails is not a reliable job — it is a job that has already failed silently at least once and nobody knew. C...
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The claim An average response time is close to useless as a health metric, because it is dominated by the many fast requests and says nothing about the few slow ones — and the slow...
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The claim Before you scale up the database instance, add a read replica, or rewrite an endpoint, run one query. In almost every under-performing application we are asked to look at...
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The claim A floating-point number cannot represent ten cents exactly, so any system that stores money in a float column will, given enough transactions, produce totals that are off...
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The claim Give every business record a stable, public-safe identifier at the moment it is created, separate from its database primary key. The auto-incrementing integer is fine ins...
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The claim LIMIT 20 OFFSET 5000 has two defects, and the well-known one is the lesser. Yes, it gets slower linearly, because the database must produce and discard five thousand rows...
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The claim A feature flag is a deployment tool with a lifespan measured in weeks. A flag that survives past its launch becomes permanent configuration nobody understands, and a code...
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The claim Most cascading outages are not caused by a component failing. They are caused by a component being slow while every timeout in the stack is longer than the one upstream o...
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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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