Tag: production

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

11 Feb 2026
We Optimised Ourselves to Death
How iteration without identity becomes drift - and why unmade decisions quietly compound risk.
05 Jul 2025
Inscribe: Updating frontmatter in-place with Go and yaml.Node
While building [a little tool to sync up YouTube video descriptions from hugo](../wordsonsand/projector-sync.md), I nee...
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...
07 Nov 2011
Directed Acyclic Graphs and Executing Tasks in Order (and in Parallel) Based on Dependencies
A little while ago, there was a requirement to write a tool that could take a number of tasks each with a set of depend...
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...