Tag: production

Writing about production systems - the failure modes, trade-offs, and decisions that only reveal themselves under real load.

07 Apr 2026
Priced In
Two ticketing systems. Same client. Same payment provider. We were moving fast — that was the explicit choice, theirs a...
31 Mar 2026
I Know People Like You
A few years ago, I was interviewed for a role. I was talking about a ticketing system I'd built - originally in Spring,...
24 Mar 2026
It Gets Everywhere
In 1999, I was building websites in ASP (before there was .NET) and MSSQL Server. We had a Windows NT server that I had...
24 Mar 2026
Even Light Gets Heavier
A dedicated input type is better than reusing your domain model at the API boundary. Test layers matter. Writing log st...
11 Feb 2026
We Optimised Ourselves to Death
How iteration without identity becomes drift - and why unmade decisions quietly compound risk.
17 Jul 2024
Microservices vs Monolith: Real World Tradeoffs
When starting a new backend system for a contract I was on, one of the early decisions I had to make was whether to lea...
06 Nov 2011
PostgreSQL performing huge updates
PostgreSQL is a pretty powerful database server and will work with almost any settings thrown at it. It is really good ...
02 Nov 2011
Tracking progress of an update statement
Sometimes there is a need to execute a long running update statement. This update statement might be modifying millions...
25 Apr 2011
Java Object Size In Memory
Anyone who has worked with java in a high end application will be well aware of the double edged sword that is java gar...