DevOps
How to Run an Incident Postmortem That Prevents Repeats
Most postmortems produce a document and no change. How to run one that ends in owned, dated actions instead of a wiki page nobody reads twice.
David White 6 min read Developer productivity that works
Practical advice for engineers who want to ship better software, faster.
David White 6 min read Backend
Database Transaction Isolation Levels Explained
Read committed, repeatable read, serializable: what each isolation level actually prevents, the anomalies they allow, and how to pick one without guessing.
Gareth Clubb 6 min read DevOps
How to Roll Back a Bad Deploy Without Making It Worse
Rollback is not an undo button. When to roll back a bad deploy, when to roll forward, and the migration and cache traps that make rollbacks fail.
Jonny Rowse 7 min read Backend
The Developer's Guide to Timeouts
Most HTTP clients ship with no timeout at all. How to set connect, read and database timeouts that fail fast instead of hanging forever.
Gareth Clubb 6 min read Tools & Tech
Python 3.15: What's New and How to Prepare
Python 3.15 lands on 1 October 2026 with lazy imports, UTF-8 by default, the Tachyon profiler and a faster JIT. What changed and what to test before RC1.
Zubair Hasan 7 min read Backend
How to Design Webhooks That Don't Lose Events
Webhook design guide: at-least-once delivery, retries with backoff, idempotent consumers, HMAC signatures, and why you should never trust event order.
David White 6 min read Architecture
The Strangler Fig Pattern: Replacing a Legacy System Without a Rewrite
The strangler fig pattern explained: replace a legacy system incrementally with a routing facade, parallel runs, and a ratchet, no big-bang rewrite needed.
Jonny Rowse 8 min read Architecture
The Saga Pattern: Managing Distributed Transactions Without Two-Phase Commit
A practical guide to the saga pattern: choreography vs orchestration, compensating transactions, and how to keep distributed workflows consistent without 2PC.
Gareth Clubb 9 min read DevOps
Managing Environment Variables and Secrets in CI/CD Pipelines
How to manage environment variables and secrets in CI/CD pipelines safely: scoping, masking, OIDC, rotation, and the mistakes that leak credentials.
Zubair Hasan 9 min read