Uncategorized

  • MCP, read as a protocol rather than as a product

    A specification for giving a model access to tools and data, read for what it standardises rather than for what it enables. The protocol is small and the…

  • Reading from a replica, and the request that must not

    Two years of read splitting, and the twelfth place that had to read the primary. Naming the two reads differently is what keeps the count knowable — twelve…

  • The service running since 2020 that nothing depended on

    A systemd unit enabled and running for five years, consuming a gigabyte, serving a feature that was removed in 2021. Nothing alerts on a service that is working…

  • Retention split by class, on 900 million rows

    One table with two retention requirements, seven years apart, and no column distinguishing them. The technical work was a generated column and a backfill; the work that took…

  • A single binary against a runtime, costed

    A recurring proposal to move a service to a compiled language, costed properly rather than argued about. The performance difference is real and is irrelevant to the caller,…

  • A certificate inventory built by scanning ourselves

    An inventory of what is configured, compared against an inventory of what is actually listening. Scanning your own address space is a thing that feels excessive until it…

  • Anonymising rows that must be kept and must not identify

    Financial records retained for seven years, containing personal data that may not be retained that long. Keeping the postcode district and discarding the rest is the compromise that…

  • Ninety seconds, and what changed about how people work

    A suite at four minutes forty that people ran on push, and at ninety seconds that people run on save. There is a threshold below which running the…

  • An ssh certificate authority, one year on

    A year of eight-hour certificates rather than an authorized_keys file, and the operational reality of it. The mid-incident expiry is the failure mode that theory does not predict,…

  • A module boundary that had quietly merged

    Two modules with a layer rule permitting each to depend on the other, which is not a boundary. A rule that permits a cycle is a rule that…