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Rick Branson
Rick Branson

391 Followers

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Mar 12, 2021

Don’t Fucking Deploy on Friday

If a change isn’t safe to deploy to production, don’t do it on Friday. Don’t be a jerk and spoil the team’s weekend. But it points to a symptom of a greater problem — exactly why is it not safe to deploy that change on Friday? This lack of safety…

Software Engineering

2 min read

Don’t Fucking Deploy on Friday
Don’t Fucking Deploy on Friday
Software Engineering

2 min read


Apr 4, 2020

10 Things I Hate About PostgreSQL

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. …

Postgresql

10 min read

10 Things I Hate About PostgreSQL
10 Things I Hate About PostgreSQL
Postgresql

10 min read


Mar 29, 2020

Rick’s Bloody Mary Mix

“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. …

Bloody Mary

2 min read

Rick’s Bloody Mary Mix
Rick’s Bloody Mary Mix
Bloody Mary

2 min read


Mar 20, 2020

Does your WiFi suck for video calls? Use 20MHz channels!

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. …

Wifi

3 min read

Does your WiFi suck for video calls? Use 20MHz channels!
Does your WiFi suck for video calls? Use 20MHz channels!
Wifi

3 min read


Feb 7, 2020

Deploy Frequency is a Vanity Metric

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. …

Software Development

10 min read

Deploy Frequency is a Vanity Metric
Deploy Frequency is a Vanity Metric
Software Development

10 min read


Feb 4, 2020

Lean Into Those “Single Points of Failure”

“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…

Software Development

3 min read

Lean Into Those  “Single Points of Failure”
Lean Into Those  “Single Points of Failure”
Software Development

3 min read


Feb 3, 2020

A Single Metric for Product Quality

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. …

Software Development

2 min read

Software Development

2 min read


Feb 1, 2020

Stop Counting Production Incidents

“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! …

Software Development

6 min read

Stop Counting Production Incidents
Stop Counting Production Incidents
Software Development

6 min read


Jan 7, 2020

Sharing an SQLite database across containers is surprisingly brilliant

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…

Dev Ops

5 min read

Sharing SQLite databases across containers is surprisingly brilliant
Sharing SQLite databases across containers is surprisingly brilliant
Dev Ops

5 min read


Dec 20, 2019

RDS Pricing Has More Than Doubled

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…

AWS

3 min read

RDS Pricing Has More Than Doubled
RDS Pricing Has More Than Doubled
AWS

3 min read

Rick Branson

Rick Branson

391 Followers

I do Software Engineering on High-Impact, Large-Scale Internet Services.

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