Skip to content

Reading path

The articles in an order that makes sense.

The archive is sorted by date, and date is the wrong order for content that builds on itself. This is the order I would write in if I were teaching from scratch: each article assumes the previous one and sets up the next.

  1. 1Engineering5 minLatency, throughput and percentiles: the guide that settles the argumentYour average latency is lying to you. The three concepts that turn 'the system is slow' into a sentence with a number, an endpoint and a percentile.
  2. 2Engineering5 minCaching: the four traps nobody anticipatesAdding a cache is easy. The hard part is living with the four consequences it creates, and all four have known solutions.
  3. 3Engineering6 minIndexes, EXPLAIN and the slow queryHow an index works on the inside, why column order decides everything, and how to read an execution plan to know what to do.
  4. 4Engineering6 minSharding: a decision guideSharding is the most irreversible decision in a data system. This is the guide to deciding whether you need it and, if you do, how to pick the key.
  5. 5Engineering5 minCAP, PACELC and the consistency modelsCAP is the most quoted and most badly stated theorem in distributed computing. This article fixes the statement and shows the vocabulary you actually use day to day.
  6. 6Engineering5 minSaga and outbox: a transaction without a distributed transactionYou need to debit one account and credit another, and they live in different databases. The two patterns that solve it in practice, and what to avoid.
  7. 7Engineering6 minThe five resilience patterns that stop a cascading failureHow one slow secondary dependency takes down the whole system in ninety seconds, and the five patterns that prevent it.
  8. 8Engineering5 minSchema migration without downtimeWhy renaming a column breaks production, and the four step pattern that turns a migration into a Tuesday afternoon task.
  9. 9Engineering6 minObservability: metrics, logs and traces, and what each one answersThe three pillars are not interchangeable. Each answers a different question, and using the wrong one is why investigations drag on for hours.

Talk to me

Questions about the article? Message me on WhatsApp

No form and no mailing list. If you disagree with something I wrote, or want to tell me how you solved it, the conversation goes straight to me.

Open the chat