Published in Better Programming·Jan 24The Path of Getting Comfortable in ProductionMy path to getting comfortable in production — 4 years ago, I was quite a decent coder, I’ve been doing desktop development for about 6 years, I even managed a small team, but I never had the chance to work with highly available distributed systems leveraging short delivery cycles. 4 years ago I made the switch, going “all…Dev Ops7 min read
Published in Riskified Technology·Sep 2, 2021(Over)Pay As You Go for Your DatastoreAs a small startup, you want to move fast and deliver business value quickly. It can be a small proof of concept to verify your product-market fit, or maybe you want to deliver some feature to an existing customer. …Finops8 min read
Published in Riskified Technology·May 19, 2021How I Finally Conquered My Never-Ending Tech Reading ListToday, knowledge is more accessible than ever before. Actually finding the time to read it, though? Now that’s another issue altogether.” If you are a software engineer, I am sure your web browser has, at any moment in time, at least four open tabs of things you will read “the…Notion5 min read
Apr 27, 2021The Good, The Bad, And Alerting on DerivativesProduction systems are constantly changing. It can be new code that is being deployed, it might be a change in usage pattern due to the onboarding of a new customer, or simple degradation in performance due to worldwide network issues. Those changes are inevitable, and therefore our system should always…Observability7 min read
Published in Riskified Technology·Mar 1, 2021Oh, Dear! Contagious Legacy CodeIn my previous post, I talked about anchoring bias, and how it affects the evolution and quality of our legacy code. I’ve argued that when working with legacy code, developers allow themselves things (in terms of quality, usually) that they otherwise wouldn’t. I’d like to continue talking about legacy code…Culture4 min read
Published in The Startup·Dec 7, 2020Don’t Put All Your Models in One DumpsterCode readability and structure evolves. What was once a small, readable, neat codebase, within a few weeks can become a messy repository with many objects, where it’s hard to navigate the relationships between them In the short article below, I’d like to share with you, one, very common pattern, that…Programming5 min read
Published in Better Programming·Nov 16, 20205 Practical Tips for Positive Code ReviewsCode reviews can be hard, but they don’t have to be — Most developers agree that code reviews are an important part of the development cycle. Even more developers think that code reviews are a great platform for learning and improving your professional skills. …Programming6 min read
Published in Riskified Technology·Sep 3, 2020Engineering For FailureNot so long ago, our systems were simple: we had one machine, with one process, probably no more than one external datastore, and the entire request lifecycle was processed and handled within this simple world. Our users were also accustomed to a certain SLA standard — a 2-second page load…Software Engineering7 min read
Published in Riskified Technology·Jun 17, 2020Feeling Anchored to Your Legacy Code?Feeling Anchored to Your Legacy Code? We all have in our code base this one huge class which is just a big ball of mud. It probably handles loads of different concerns, maintained by dozens of developers, and changes a lot. …Software Development3 min read
Published in Riskified Technology·Mar 26, 2020500MB of Memory Saved Us ~60% in our DynamoDB BillThe main goal of the development department in a fast-growing startup is to deliver business value — and deliver it fast. In many cases this speed comes with a price tag — in some cases we might choose the easiest solution to implement rather than the optimal solution, in other…AWS6 min read
