Retries That Do Not Take Your Service Down: Backoff With Jitter in 40 Lines
A plain retry loop turns one slow dependency into an outage. Here is exponential backoff with full jitter in Python, with a test you can run.
What I Wish I Had Known Before My First On-Call Rotation
Six years of pager duty, boiled down: what to set up before the shift, what to do at 3 a.m., and why asking for help is the job.
Building Tidepool: A Small Job Queue on Top of Postgres
We ran a broker for a workload of 40 jobs a minute. Tidepool is the Postgres-backed queue I built instead, and the one query that makes it safe.
Six Months With Marlin, the Task Runner That Reads Like a Makefile Should
Marlin replaces my Makefiles with a plain file of named commands. Six months in: what I like, what bit me, and who should skip it.
TIL: Postgres Will Tell You Why It Ignored Your Index
A query slow for no reason turned out to be a type mismatch. EXPLAIN shows the cast, and one line fixes it.
TIL: git bisect run Finds the Bad Commit While You Make Tea
You can hand git bisect a script and walk away. It narrows hundreds of commits down to one on its own.
Writing the Design Doc Nobody Reads, and the One They Do
Most design docs get skimmed and approved. A few change the plan. What the second kind does in its first page, and how to write it.
A Reproducible Dev Shell With One Dockerfile and a Few Lines of Bash
Stop answering “works on my machine.” A dev container you can build with one command and throw away without regret.
Quillfish Is the Fastest Linter I Have Used, and It Wants You to Change Your Style
Quillfish checks a 400,000-line repository in under two seconds. It also has opinions you cannot turn off, and that is half its charm.
TIL: set -euo pipefail Does Not Do What I Thought
My safety line at the top of every script has three gaps. A short tour of the places a bash script still keeps going after an error.
