Building for the long tail
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.
Latest writing
- Notes on system reliability· 50 minutes ago · 25,703 reads
- The cost of context switching· 19 hours ago
- Notes on system reliability· 2 minutes ago
Rethinking notification design
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.
From the archive
Naming is one of the hardest problems in software, yet we spend less time on it than we should. Let's talk about why it matters and how to get better at it.
About this site
Occasional thoughts on engineering practices, tooling, and how we think about code. No sponsors, no tracking, no ads.
Thoughts on craft. Updated weekly.
Elsewhere
Occasional thoughts on technical topics. Past essays here.