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Writing

Long posts about databases, queues, caching and the parts of a system nobody puts on a conference slide.

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The index existed. Postgres ignored it anyway17 September 2026 The index existed. Postgres ignored it anywayA statistics problem that looked like a planner bug for three days, and how to tell the difference.Your retries are the outage17 September 2026 Your retries are the outageExponential backoff without jitter, and the thundering herd that took four hours to recognise.Cache invalidation is a routing problem17 September 2026 Cache invalidation is a routing problemWhy publish-subscribe beat every time-to-live we tried, and the one case where it did not.Connection pools lie to you17 September 2026 Connection pools lie to youWhat the pool metrics show, what the database sees, and the gap that hid a leak for a month.We deleted the microservice17 September 2026 We deleted the microserviceEighteen months in, two engineers, and a network hop that cost more than the isolation was worth.Latency is a distribution, not a number17 September 2026 Latency is a distribution, not a numberThe p50 was fine. It was always fine. That was the problem.

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If the queue is the problem, I have probably seen your queue

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