Engineering Strategy
Alerts That Don't Wake You at 3 AM
Most on-call pain is bad alerts, not bad systems. Alert on symptoms users feel, page only on what needs a human now, and kill the rest. The rules.
Topic hub
Engineering Strategy
Platform bets, build-vs-buy, technical debt economics, and leading engineering at FAANG scale.
8 articles
Observability
Engineering Strategy
SLOs and Error Budgets That Hold Up
An SLO you never enforce is a number on a wiki. How to set SLOs from user experience, turn them into an error budget, and actually act on the burn rate.
Engineering Strategy
Grafana Dashboards for Operators, Not Executives
Most Grafana dashboards are decoration. An operator dashboard answers one question fast during an incident. How to design dashboards that speed up debugging.
Staff engineer craft
Engineering Strategy
Microservice Incident Response That Works
In microservices, the hard part of incident response is locating the fault across services. The triage order, the tools, and how to stop cascades fast.
Engineering Strategy
Incident Postmortems for Staff Engineers
A blameless incident postmortem fixes the system, not the person. The structure, the root-cause discipline, and the action items that actually get done.
Engineering Strategy
Writing RFCs That Survive Design Review
An RFC that survives design review states the problem, the options, and a justified decision, not just a chosen design. The structure and the failure modes.
Service design
Engineering Strategy
Platform Service Design for Internal Teams
Platform service design means building internal services as products for your own engineers. The golden-path model, the self-service rule, and what to avoid.
Build systems
Engineering Strategy
Bazel Monorepo Builds for Large Systems
Bazel makes large monorepo builds fast through hermetic, cached, incremental builds, but the cost is up-front rigor. When it pays off, and how to adopt it.