engineering
Database-generated IDs almost always have gaps, and most of the time that's fine. The cases where it isn't fine require different machinery, and the cost of that machinery is worth understanding before you reach for it.
engineering
Most pagination bugs come from clients constructing or modifying tokens in ways that look reasonable but break when the underlying data changes. Tokens that the server can verify and reject cleanly are the difference between a robust API and a fragile one.
engineering
Most application-level coordination problems get solved with Redis or with a distributed lock library. Postgres has had advisory locks built in for over fifteen years, and they're a much better fit for many of those problems than the alternatives most teams reach for.
engineering
Cron jobs fail in two ways: they run twice when they should run once, or they don't run at all when they should. The standard mitigations — flock files, distributed locks, manual cleanup scripts — paper over these failures rather than designing for them. The patterns that actually work tre...
engineering
Throttling and rate limiting look similar from the outside but solve different problems. Confusing them produces APIs that are technically protected but practically unusable, or APIs that look fair but quietly let one customer take down a shared dependency.
engineering
The query planner doesn't run your query — it estimates which plan would be fastest based on statistics about your data. When the statistics drift from reality, the planner picks plans that look fast on paper and run terribly in practice.
history
The story of the lightbulb is told as Edison's triumph in his Menlo Park laboratory, but the real history is a 200-year arc through dozens of inventors, three lighting transitions, and one of the most consequential energy displacements in human history.
engineering
The connection string is one of those tiny configuration values that compounds into a major operational headache when treated casually. The patterns that hold up are the ones that take the credential lifecycle seriously from the start.
engineering
The choice between polling and webhooks looks like a technical decision but is actually about who bears the cost of latency and reliability. The patterns that hold up are the ones that match the cost-bearer to the party with the most leverage.
engineering
Deadlocks are the concurrency failure mode that most teams discover the hard way: under load, in production, with the database log filling up with deadlock-victim notices. The good news is that deadlocks are well-understood and largely preventable through a small set of disciplines.
engineering
PostgreSQL has had a real-time pub/sub mechanism since the 1990s and most application code does not know it exists. LISTEN/NOTIFY is a quiet, reliable, and load-appropriate alternative to running Redis or Kafka for many real-time use cases that small SaaS teams encounter.
culture
Steel is so foundational to the modern world that we rarely think about how it came to be cheap. The five-thousand-year story of how iron-with-just-enough-carbon went from precious sword material to ubiquitous building substance is mostly a story of fuel chemistry, with one decisive ninete...