Price the exit before you sign the integration
The claim The monthly fee is the smallest number in a software decision. The number that determines whether you are still using that tool in 2032 — happily or otherwise — is what i...
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Insights & tutorials
Engineering notes, infrastructure deep dives and practical guides from the Exotecho team.
In Ontario, WCAG 2.0 AA is a legal deadline you missed
The claim Accessibility is filed under "nice to have" in most Ontario businesses' backlogs. It has not been optional since January 1st, 2021. Under the Integrated Accessibility Sta...
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Every timeout must be shorter than the one in front
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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A staging environment unlike production proves nothing
The claim Most staging environments differ from production in ways that guarantee they cannot catch the failures people expect them to catch: a smaller database, different configur...
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The rewrite will cost three times what you approved
The claim The estimate for a full rewrite is derived from the features you can see. The cost is driven by the features you cannot — the eleven years of edge cases, exceptions and q...
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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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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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