Writing
Essays on distributed systems, backend engineering, system design and building reliable software around real constraints.
All writing
6 essays
Low database CPU and fast queries do not prove that a system has spare capacity. Learn how contention, connection pools and queueing create timeouts while the database still looks healthy.
Read articleTransactions can commit while business invariants still fail. Learn how isolation levels, write skew, locking, optimistic concurrency and serializable execution shape database correctness.
Read articleA practical guide to maintaining correctness when one business operation must update multiple services, databases or external systems.
Read articleA practical way to make failure a useful design input without turning every service into a fortress.
Read articleWhy stable ownership and data rules matter more than drawing smaller boxes around code.
Read articleHow to reason about duplicate work in transactional systems where retrying is unavoidable.
Read article