Your retries are the outage
September 17, 2026
Exponential backoff without jitter, and the thundering herd that took four hours to recognise.
From the bench
Connection pools lie to you
September 17, 2026
What the pool metrics show, what the database sees, and the gap that hid a leak for a month.
The index existed. Postgres ignored it anyway
September 17, 2026
A statistics problem that looked like a planner bug for three days, and how to tell the difference.
We deleted the microservice
September 17, 2026
Eighteen months in, two engineers, and a network hop that cost more than the isolation was worth.
Latency is a distribution, not a number
September 17, 2026
The p50 was fine. It was always fine. That was the problem.