A Practical Roadmap For Newcomers Who Want To Ship Real Backend Systems

Here is the route I wish someone had drawn on day one: 1. Learn the runtime before the syntax, then…

Long-exposure light streaks in the dark, photo by Marek Piwnicki on Pexels
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BACKEND Runtime

Queue Rewrite: Notes From The Migration

October 2, 2024. I set aside one week to move our main service at work (a match-making backend that had been running in production for five years) onto the new broker. It…

Rows of servers in a data hall, photo by panumas nikhomkhai on Pexels
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Queues

Nine Months Of Running A Read Replica On A Tiny Budget

We kept the primary untouched and pushed every dashboard query onto a replica that costs less than a laptop. Here is what broke…

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41 likes  ·  1.3K reads
STORAGE Replicas

Tracing A Slow Endpoint Without Buying Another Tool

A checkout call sat at 2.4 seconds for months. Three afternoons with the traces we already collected took it to 310 ms, and the fix was…

Terminal output on a dark screen, photo by Daniil Komov on Pexels
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Tracing