Store money as integer cents, never as a float
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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Insights & tutorials
Engineering notes, infrastructure deep dives and practical guides from the Exotecho team.
Buy the boring plugin, not the exciting one
The claim When you add a third-party plugin, extension, or library to the software your business runs on, the feature list is the least important thing to evaluate. The number that...
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Your uptime monitor should log in, not just ping
The claim A monitor that fetches your homepage and checks for a 200 status confirms the least useful thing about your business: that a web server is running. The failures that cost...
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Put a UUID on the invoice before you need it
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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Turn off SSH passwords and the botnets lose interest
The claim Every public SSH port on the internet receives thousands of password guesses a day within hours of coming online. The standard responses — moving the port, installing fai...
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Offset pagination lies to you after page fifty
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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Offboarding is a same-day checklist, not a week
The claim When someone leaves your company, every account they could reach should be closed or transferred before the end of their last day — and for an involuntary departure, with...
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If it matters, systemd should be the thing starting it
The claim Every long-running process on a production Linux host should be a systemd unit. Not pm2, not a screen session someone detached from in the spring, not nohup & in a deploy...
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Every feature flag needs a deletion date
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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