Over the last few years, the software development community’s love affair with the popular open-source relational database has reached a bit of a fever pitch. …

“It tastes like a foot” — Cliff Moon (2020) A little detour from our regularly scheduled program. I find the pre-made mixes in the store to be lacking in flavor and considering that… quite expensive. Now that the bars are closed thanks to the Roni, I’m stuck fending for myself. …

After years of trials and tribulations in San Francisco apartments, the single best thing I did for my home network was to switch most devices to the 5GHz band and limit it to 20MHz channel width. Once I did that pretty much all of my WiFi woes went away. …

It’s 10:30 on a Monday morning. Daily standup time. You walk into the room where it’s been held every day since the company moved into this building. …

“You should go all in on your single points of failure,” I say with obnoxiously casual confidence, moments before incredulous glares dart my way. In 2015, Amazon’s DynamoDB database service suffered from a multi-day outage in their US East Coast region that had major ripple effects. Queueing (SQS), auto-scaling for…

This was extracted from my piece on counting production incidents to reduce its footprint. Unfortunately for die-hard metrics folks, the reality is that the higher-ups really do want a single figure that fits nicely into one cell of a spreadsheet. …

“What can be counted doesn’t always count, and not everything that counts can be counted.” — William Bruce Cameron Aviation incidents and fatalities go down over time. The chart above tells us that much. It also tells us something else: fatalities per incident are all over the place! …

This is a graph of latency in milliseconds. It’s the latency of Segment’s streaming pipeline fetching a critical piece of customer-specific configuration. This pipeline often handles north of 500,000 messages per second. Normally when I see a graph like this, it makes me very anxious. How can the exact same…

This blew me away. I have been using AWS in production for ten years. Until today, I made the assumption that their Relational Database Service (RDS) carried around a 33% premium over EC2. That’s the way it started out. AWS usually drops prices over time, right? RDS uses the same…