3h ago · 3 min read · You Can't Hire Your Way to Reliability I've seen companies hire 5 SREs and expect reliability to magically improve. It doesn't. Reliability is a cultural outcome, not a headcount metric. The Reliability Maturity Model Level 1: Reactive "Things break,...
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4h ago · 7 min read · If you run scripts on a server, you already know the uncomfortable truth: most failures are silent until something downstream breaks. A backup script stops running. A cleanup task hangs halfway through. A sync job exits early because a dependency cha...
Join discussion1d ago · 8 min read · If your homepage returns 200 OK, your monitoring dashboard may look perfectly healthy. Meanwhile, a failed cron job might stop sending invoices, a stuck worker might stop processing emails, or a scheduled cleanup might quietly stop running for days. ...
Join discussion2d ago · 8 min read · Background job monitoring tools are easy to underestimate until a worker stops, a queue stalls, and nobody notices for hours. The app still loads, dashboards still look green, and users keep clicking buttons, but emails stop sending, imports freeze, ...
Join discussion3d ago · 3 min read · The Backup That Wasn't We had backups. Daily snapshots to S3. Perfectly configured. Never tested. When we needed to restore after a data corruption incident, we discovered the backups had been silently failing for 3 weeks. The S3 bucket policy had ch...
Join discussion3d ago · 7 min read · Building sustainable on-call practices for small engineering teams Maintaining high-availability systems with a small engineering team presents a challenging paradox: you need enterprise-level reliability without enterprise-level resources. Whether y...
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5d ago · 3 min read · The SLO Translation Problem You define an SLO: 99.95% availability with p99 latency under 200ms. Engineering loves it. Product managers glaze over. The problem isn't the SLO. It's how we communicate it. Speaking Product Language Translate technical S...
Join discussion6d ago · 10 min read · Background worker failures are easy to miss because the app can look healthy while important work silently stops in the background. Users can still log in, browse pages, and click buttons, but emails do not go out, invoices do not sync, reports do no...
Join discussionApr 17 · 9 min read · Last quarter, a team I advise at a Fortune 100 company built a multi-agent pipeline that could analyze SEC filings, cross-reference market data, and generate investment summaries. In the demo, it was stunning. GPT-4o handled reasoning. Claude did the...
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Apr 17 · 6 min read · You deploy a distributed database. The docs promise linearizable reads, durable writes, and seamless failover. You build your app on those guarantees. Then one day, a network partition hits, a node restarts, and suddenly you've got duplicate charges,...
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