Work I take
Short, defined pieces of work with a written deliverable. I do not do staff augmentation and I do not take equity.
Engagements
Query and index reviewOne week against your slowest twenty queries, with the explain plans, the index changes and the ones that should be rewritten instead. Written up, not a call.USD 3800.00
Queue and backpressure auditWhere the work piles up, what happens when a consumer dies, and whether your retries are making the outage longer.USD 5200.00
Caching strategyWhat to cache, for how long, and how it gets invalidated without a deploy. Most of the value is in the invalidation.USD 4400.00
Incident review facilitationI run the postmortem as an outsider so nobody in the room has to. Blameless in practice, not just on the template.USD 2600.00
Postgres upgrade planA written cutover plan with the rollback, tested against a copy of your data rather than against a blog post.USD 4000.00
Shorter
Asked often
Mostly by email, so they are answered here instead.
Is there a newsletter?
No. There is an RSS feed and a search endpoint, and posts stay at the same URL forever. If you want to know when something new appears, the feed is the honest way to do it.
Do you take sponsored posts?
No, and I never have. Where I have worked with a vendor whose product appears in a post, it is disclosed in the first paragraph.
Can I republish a post?
A quotation with a link is always fine. For a full republication, ask first — the answer is usually yes for non-commercial use.
What do you do when a post turns out to be wrong?
A correction goes at the top with the date and, unless they would rather not be named, the person who caught it. The original text stays; quiet edits are how a site loses its readers.
How much consulting do you take?
Two engagements a quarter, all of them short and all of them ending with a written deliverable. No staff augmentation, no equity, no retainers.
What clients and readers say
Read all the reviews★★★★★
p99 went from four seconds to under three hundred milliseconds in a week.
★★★★★
The retries post saved us in the middle of an incident.
★★★★★
Facilitated our worst postmortem. Nobody got blamed and we fixed the cause.
★★★★★
Long posts. Worth it, but block out the time.
Something in here sound like your problem?
Read the latest