Most retry logic I've removed turned out to be hiding a real bug. The retries made the failure invisible, and the bug co…

Caches solve a problem and create three new ones: invalidation, observability, and the slow drift between what the cache…

I write smaller commits than I used to. The commits are uglier in isolation and much easier to read in sequence.…

When a system surprises me, my first instinct used to be to fix the surprise. Now my first instinct is to figure out whi…

The fastest debugging trick I've learned is to write out, in one sentence, what the system is supposed to be doing. Half…