Mitigating infrastructure risk
When you are building a product on the internet, you should aim to get it out as soon as humanly possible. Things you don’t want to care that moment include ...
Recent Posts
I got hit by a car
Exactly two months ago I was out on my very usual bike route and I heard the radar warning me that a car was behind me, then I heard the car braking hard and...
Zero downtime redis migration (or upgrade)
I wrote about migrating the Redis database from AWS ElastiCache to another provider a few years ago . In my case it was Azure, but it doesn’t matter. I used ...
The bus factor
When building any product or business, you want to make it as resilient as possible. You should do that from the very beginning, but sometimes this is hard, ...
How to 10X your PR review quality
During my career in software development, proper communication (or lack of it) has been crucial in instigating some creative discussions and/or flame wars du...
Rescue exception in Ruby and continue
Usually when we run scheduled jobs we like to bunch a few things together for convenience. Let’s say that you have hourly, daily, weekly, monthly task list t...
5 things where Server Rendered apps beat SPA
I’m a huge proponent of server rendered apps. As someone that started with cluttered desktop apps close to two decades ago, and did his best to push as much ...
How to avoid meetings and replace them with emails
Regardless whether you are starting out or a seasoned veteran in your field of work, one thing is constant: Customers will want to hop on calls with you to ...
(Relational) Databases are awesome
When I say databases, I think about relational database systems. It doesn’t matter which flavour of relational database you choose. They are all fine and str...
Documenting versus fixing
When you would rather have something properly documented than fixed.
Accepting ignorance is the basis of the scientific method
“Ignoramus” (“We don’t know”, Latin)
A great support person is an angel and the devil in one package
Companies are discovering that hiring people to mollify critics and disappointed customers is cheaper (in the short run) than changing things, learning fr...
The stack you use to build your next app is irrelevant
How to choose the best stack for your app?
Processes and systems make your life easier
Everything is a process, whether we document it or not.
The joy of missing out
I was listening to a podcast with Jason Fried the other day and heard this term: “The Joy of Missing Out” or JOMO. It took me a couple of days to process wha...
Power of automation
Not while I have two healthy hands.
The value of a great post-mortem
I never lose, I either win or learn. Nelson Mandela
How to migrate your Redis database from one cloud provider to another
I’ve been doing a migration of our whole infrastructure from AWS to Azure recently. One of the services we use is Redis, which we use for caching purposes an...
Migrating Route53 DNS records to Azure
Recently I’ve been notified that we need to move our operations away from AWS to Azure. One of the steps I found interesting (and never did before) was migra...
The subtle art of debugging weird issues
As a senior reliability engineer I’m tasked with solving weird issues on a weekly basis. Issues you could sometimes classify as heisenbugs, at other times th...