Ideas, Experiments, and Lessons Learned
Forty-three pages in one month. Yes, I counted. Counting felt more productive than answering them. The Scene Here’s the setup. We’re five backend devs. When I joined I was the eager one who wired up Prometheus and Alertmanager over a weekend, copying alert thresholds from a blog post: CPU over 80%, disk over 70%, memory…
Four hours. Two engineers. One bug that only showed up a couple of times a day. And the punchline: the code responsible was mine, written six months ago, with a comment that said “simple wrapper, do not overthink.” I did not overthink it. That was the whole problem. The Scene A Tuesday afternoon, support forwarded…
A month ago I gave an AI agent write access to our deploy pipeline. Real credentials. CI logs, error dashboards, the rollback button, even our Slack. I did this on purpose, which is the part my coworkers still bring up at lunch. The pitch I made to myself was simple: deploys fail at 3 AM,…
Three hours. That’s how long I stared at my screen, questioning my career choices, doubting everything I knew about programming. And you know what the problem was? A single character. A missing letter. A typo. The Scene It was a Friday afternoon. Simple task — fetch some data from an API, process it, save to…
The Bug That Made Me Feel Stupid Three hours. That’s how long I stared at my screen, questioning my career choices, before finding the fix. One line. That’s all it took. Let me tell you what happened. What I Was Building I was working on a simple API endpoint that fetched user data from our…
It happened on a Tuesday afternoon I was 23 years old, fresh out of my first startup, and confident. Too confident. We had a small team — me, a frontend dev, and the founder. I was handling everything backend, and honestly, I thought I had it figured out. We were migrating our PostgreSQL database to…
It was 2 AM. I was half-asleep, running what I thought was a local database cleanup script. I was wrong. I was connected to production. The Mistake I had a simple script to delete old test records from my local database. Something like: DELETE FROM users WHERE created_at < '2024-01-01' AND environment = 'test'; The...
It was 2 AM when my phone rang. Our production server was down for the third time that week. I pulled up the logs, checked the metrics, and saw the same pattern: memory usage climbing steadily until the OOM killer stepped in and terminated our Node.js process. The Symptoms Let me paint the picture: Restarted…
It was 2 AM. My phone buzzed. Our monitoring system was screaming. I had just run a migration script that was supposed to clean up old records. Instead, it deleted half our user table. Here is what happened and what I learned. The Setup We had a table with inactive users. The business wanted to…
I still remember my first on-call shift. It was a Friday night, I was three drinks in, and my phone started buzzing. Production database was down. My heart rate spiked. I had no idea what to do. That’s when I realized — nobody teaches you this stuff. You learn to code. You learn algorithms. But…