Notes on system reliability
Distributed systems fail in ways that are hard to predict. After years of debugging production incidents, certain patterns keep recurring. This post explores a few.
Recent writing
- A philosophy of naming conventions · 3 days ago · 51,103 reads
- On writing code that lasts · 9 hours ago
- Lessons from legacy codebases · 38 minutes ago
On writing code that lasts
Most codebases grow in directions their authors never anticipated. The pressure to optimize early is real, but constraints often produce more elegant solutions than freedom ever could.
From the archive
Performance optimization is a tempting distraction. Every line of code that exists to optimize one specific case is a line that must be maintained and understood forever.
About this site
These are my notes on building reliable, readable, maintainable systems. Interested in clarity over cleverness.
Thoughts on design. Updated monthly.
Elsewhere
Occasional notes on technical topics. Archives here.