By Jane Park · 2024-11-29 · 14 min read · distributed architecture
After a decade of writing and reviewing distributed systems, I have a confession: most of them are not distributed. They are a single database with a small fleet of stateless services in front. This post explores the gap...
By Ali Mahdavi · 2024-11-27 · 9 min · rust performance
Rust is wonderful. I have written it professionally for four years. I have also written a lot of Go. The cases where Rust's safety story actually pays off are narrower than the discourse suggests...
By Jane Park · 2024-11-24 · 7 min · architecture
Every team I have worked on has, at some point, decomposed a monolith prematurely. The results are consistent: more bugs, more on-call, slower feature velocity. Here is a defense of the boring path...
By Ben Schwarz · 2024-11-22 · 18 min · sqlite postgres
For a particular shape of workload, SQLite outperforms Postgres by a wide margin. We migrated our analytics service and saw a 4x latency reduction and a 70% cost reduction. Here is how...
By Ali Mahdavi · 2024-11-19 · 6 min · performance
Knuth was right, but he was also a compiler guy. For product engineers, premature optimization is even worse than he made it sound. Here is the framework I use to decide what to optimize and when...
By Jane Park · 2024-11-15 · 22 min · startups
Over the last decade, I have helped start three companies. One is profitable. One was acquired. One quietly wound down. Here is what I learned, organized by the phase where the lesson applies...
By Ben Schwarz · 2024-11-12 · 11 min · redis
People keep using Redis as a primary store. The Redis team has been clear that it is not designed for this. We surveyed 200 production systems and found 41% of them using Redis in ways that would lose data on restart. This is a plea, not a takedown...
By Ali Mahdavi · 2024-11-08 · 13 min · aws devops
When we finished the migration, our CFO sent a thank-you note. The trade-offs were not as advertised. Here is the full accounting...
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