Turn off SSH passwords and the botnets lose interest
The claim Every public SSH port on the internet receives thousands of password guesses a day within hours of coming online. The standard responses — moving the port, installing fai...
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Insights & tutorials
Engineering notes, infrastructure deep dives and practical guides from the Exotecho team.
Offset pagination lies to you after page fifty
The claim LIMIT 20 OFFSET 5000 has two defects, and the well-known one is the lesser. Yes, it gets slower linearly, because the database must produce and discard five thousand rows...
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Offboarding is a same-day checklist, not a week
The claim When someone leaves your company, every account they could reach should be closed or transferred before the end of their last day — and for an involuntary departure, with...
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If it matters, systemd should be the thing starting it
The claim Every long-running process on a production Linux host should be a systemd unit. Not pm2, not a screen session someone detached from in the spring, not nohup & in a deploy...
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Every feature flag needs a deletion date
The claim A feature flag is a deployment tool with a lifespan measured in weeks. A flag that survives past its launch becomes permanent configuration nobody understands, and a code...
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Price the exit before you sign the integration
The claim The monthly fee is the smallest number in a software decision. The number that determines whether you are still using that tool in 2032 — happily or otherwise — is what i...
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In Ontario, WCAG 2.0 AA is a legal deadline you missed
The claim Accessibility is filed under "nice to have" in most Ontario businesses' backlogs. It has not been optional since January 1st, 2021. Under the Integrated Accessibility Sta...
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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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A staging environment unlike production proves nothing
The claim Most staging environments differ from production in ways that guarantee they cannot catch the failures people expect them to catch: a smaller database, different configur...
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