Feb 13Leveraging Mutation Testing To Onboard Legacy ProjectsYou are an accomplished engineer, your skill set is vetted, and you are trusted with a challenging task — doing some important maintenance work on a legacy service you know nothing about. The original developers of the service are long gone, you have enough business context for what it does…Programming6 min readProgramming6 min read
Published in Better Programming·Jan 23Can We Stop With Those Horrible “System Overview” Dashboards Already?It’s 2AM, you’re not asleep, your phone rings constantly with production issues. You are staring at your endless “system overview” dashboard, scrolling up and down through dozens of charts, showing different metrics and SLIs — some you’ve seen before, some are totally new to you, some are broken altogether. Some…DevOps7 min readDevOps7 min read
Published in ITNEXT·Dec 5, 2022log.warn(“This log will cost you”) On log cost optimizationDo you remember the moment you learned logs aren’t free? I for sure do. It was just after a major milestone our team achieved — we’ve just launched a new and shiny scalable service that is about to replace a legacy extremely high throughput, and extremely inefficient service. We just…DevOps9 min readDevOps9 min read
Published in Better Programming·Oct 24, 2022How to Proactively Off-Board an Engineering RoleThe process I’ve used as my own offboarding guideline — Recently, I’ve decided to get up and pursue a new professional challenge. I talked to my manager, gave my notice, and started the countdown to my last day in the company I’ve worked in for a few good years. In preparation for my departure, I’ve looked for written materials on…Engineering5 min readEngineering5 min read
Jun 20, 2022My Alerts Don’t Work Anymore, Now What?I think it’s safe to assume we all agree that you can’t run a reliable production system without a decent alerting layer. …Sre6 min readSre6 min read
May 25, 2022My Big Fat Monolithic AlertIn the last few years, the “micro-service” movement swept the software engineering landscape, becoming the de-facto standard for any modern SAAS (and any other) applications. …Production6 min readProduction6 min read
Published in Better Programming·Jan 24, 2022The 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…DevOps7 min readDevOps7 min read
Published in Riskified Tech·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 readFinops8 min read
Published in Riskified Tech·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 readNotion5 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 readObservability7 min read
