Every timeout must be shorter than the one in front
The claim Most cascading outages are not caused by a component failing. They are caused by a component being slow while every timeout in the stack is longer than the one upstream o...
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Engineering
Engineering notes, infrastructure deep dives and practical guides from the Exotecho team.
Structured logs with a request ID, or none at all
The claim Free-text log lines without a correlation identifier are not diagnostic data. They are a diary. During an incident you cannot answer the only question that matters — what...
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Never send email from inside a web request
The claim Any call to a third-party service inside a request handler makes that service a hard dependency of your application. Sending mail synchronously means your order confirmat...
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Images, not JavaScript, are what your pages weigh
The claim On a typical content or commerce site, images account for the majority of transferred bytes — usually 55% to 75% — and the fix is a build step you configure once, not a f...
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Ship every schema change as two deploys
The claim A migration that changes the shape of a table and the code that reads it in the same deploy cannot be rolled back. During the seconds or minutes when old and new applicat...
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Your health check should touch the database
The claim An endpoint that returns 200 unconditionally is worse than having no health check at all. It converts a loud failure into a silent one: your load balancer keeps routing t...
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Use Postgres full-text search before you reach for a search cluster
The claim Below roughly a million searchable rows, PostgreSQL's built-in full-text search is not a stopgap. It is the correct answer, and adding a separate search cluster at that s...
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Most business sites should render HTML on the server
The claim For a marketing site, a product catalogue, a booking flow, or an internal dashboard with a few hundred users, server-rendered HTML with a modest amount of JavaScript will...
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